RE: Decentralized Learning: The Future of Student Mobility in Europe
Natalie from Learning Machine here. I want to respond to the following mischaracterization of Blockcerts:
"Blockcerts struck me as a rather rudimentary solution. Diplomas and certifications are codified as JSON-LD and then the Learning Machine proprietary solution hashes the corresponding file and stores the hash on a public blockchain (typically the Bitcoin blockchain)."
There is nothing proprietary about the Blockcerts issuing process that hashes a certificate onto a blockchain. The cert-issuer code is in the public Github repo on blockcerts.org, and anyone can use it to build their own issuing application. Learning Machine is just one organization that has done that. We've built a product--an application--that issues Blockcerts at scale. Anyone else can do this. Dozens of researchers and institutions around the world are doing so, as you can see in the Blockcerts Community Forum at community.blockcerts.org.
Blockcerts is blockchain-agnostic, meaning it can issue to any blockchain, public or private. That includes Sovrin. We need to stop seeing these as opposing solutions and start seeing them as complimentary. As I also mentioned during the Q&A, Learning Machine's CTO is Co-Chair of the W3C Credentials Community Group which is writing the standards for Verifiable claims and Decentralized Identifiers along with the Sovrin team. We work closely together.
As to the characterization of Blockcerts as "rudimentary," I would reframe that as "simple and elegant." You don't need to buy a token, run a node, join a network, or pay anything to receive or verify a Blockcert. Sharing and verifying your certs is vendor independent, meaning you can still verify your certs even if the software provider used to issue them is no longer around. (This is not the case, for example, with verification of claims on Sovrin. You have to be a member of the Sovrin network to verify claims.) You don't even need to know what a blockchain is to see the immediate value of Blockcerts. This simplicity is what paves the way for adoption by end-users.
Oh wow, honoured to have you here Nathalie ! Thanks for the clarification. I guess I'll need to go step by step through the process to be able to argue in depth. What for me makes the difference between "simple" and "rudimentary" is that the actual certification information is not ON the blockchain. You only store a hash on the blockchain. That means for instance that an employer who looks for a fresh graduate in, say, climate science with a minor in computer science cannot go find some potential connection information on the blockchain. He neess to employ another system for that.
If the AlignmentObjects were ON the chain then one could query directly the data on the chain and possibly find DIDs of people who want to be found easily (because they want to leverage their diploma and find a job)