Decentralisation is often misunderstood.
In public debate, decentralisation is framed as disorderly; some consider it to be anti-authoritarian or incompatible with regulation. As a result, it is often treated as a rejection of rules rather than a different way of enforcing them. This framing makes decentralisation easy to dismiss, but hard to evaluate on its merits.
This common misperception overlooks a key point: decentralisation is not about anarchy. It is about safety.
Decentralisation limits the damage any single failure can cause by distributing power, data, and control. It expects problems and plans for them, rather than assuming perfect security.
This is not a radical idea. In many domains, resilient systems are built to avoid single points of collapse—consider power grids, financial markets, and the internet itself. Similarly, digital identity should be designed with solidity in mind.
Centralised identity systems optimise for control: enforcement, reporting, and integration become easier for institutions. However, they do so by aggregating risk. When a central system fails—through breach, misuse, or mission creep—the consequences are widespread and difficult to contain.
Decentralised systems reduce the value of single targets and limit data access. They make large-scale abuse harder, not by relying on trust, but by removing the conditions that enable it.
This does not mean decentralisation removes accountability; it simply changes how accountability is achieved. Rules can still be enforced, eligibility can still be proven, and compliance can still be demonstrated. The key difference is that accomplishing these objectives does not require a permanent, central record of everyone's identity and activity.
One persistent myth is that decentralisation equates to anonymity without responsibility. In reality, decentralised systems can allow selective disclosure, auditability, and strong guarantees about what is revealed and what is not. In many cases, they are more precise than centralised systems.
Resistance to decentralisation comes more from familiarity than evidence. Centralised systems are easier to reason about, echoing how institutions operate. Decentralised systems shift focus from data possession to claim verification and from storage-based to rule-based control.
That shift can be uncomfortable. But discomfort and danger are not the same.
If we aim to protect people, reduce risk, and create enduring trust, then decentralisation merits serious consideration—not as ideology, but as an engineering response to scale, failure, and misuse.
For clarity: anarchy is the absence of rules. Decentralisation, by contrast, is the careful design of systems that don't collapse when rules are tested.
When it comes to digital identity, the choice is not between order and chaos. The real decision? Whether to use architectures that assume perfection. Or to choose architectures resilient to reality.
And safety, in the long run, depends on the latter.