Bite-Sized Trust — Learning Pathways
Table of Contents
- Foundations of Digital Trust
- How Decentralized Identifiers Work
- Keys Inside DID Documents
- Advanced Key Management
- Storing and Protecting Private Keys
- Introduction to Governance
- Making Governance Work: Conformance and Trust Registries
- Privacy-Preserving Verification
- What Next?
Foundations of Digital Trust
Goal: Understand the core building blocks that make digital trust possible, before diving into any specific technology or system.
| # | Video | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Identifiers | Watch |
| 2 | Private and Public Keys | Watch |
| 3 | Digests | Watch |
| 4 | Digital Signatures | Watch |
| 5 | Verifiable Credentials | Watch |
What you will gain: a working vocabulary and a basic mental model of how identity, integrity, and authenticity are established in digital systems — the essential foundation for everything else in this series.
How Decentralized Identifiers Work
Goal: Understand what DIDs are, how they are structured, stored, and resolved, and what distinguishes one DID method from another.
| # | Video | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Self-certifying Identifiers | Watch |
| 2 | DIDs and Key Rotation | Watch |
| 3 | Where DID Documents Live | Watch |
| 4 | Resolving a DID | Watch |
| 5 | Detecting DID Document Duplicity | Watch |
| 6 | Control of DID Document Data | Watch |
What you will gain: a complete picture of how DIDs are created, resolved, and updated, and how to evaluate the trust assumptions of different DID methods — including which ones offer cryptographic proof of legitimate changes and which do not.
Keys Inside DID Documents
Goal: Go beyond the basics and understand the specific types of cryptographic keys that appear in a DID document and the distinct role each one plays.
| # | Video | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Passwords and Keys | Watch |
| 2 | Keys in DIDs | Watch |
| 3 | Authentication Keys in DIDs | Watch |
| 4 | Assertion Keys in DIDs | Watch |
| 5 | Key Agreement Keys in DIDs | Watch |
| 6 | Service Endpoints | Watch |
What you will gain: a detailed understanding of how DID documents assign different keys to different functions — authentication, signing, and encrypted communication — and how service endpoints extend a DID into a full contact point for real-world interactions.
Advanced Key Management
Goal: Understand the techniques used to make key management more resilient, including how to handle rotation, pre-rotation, and shared control.
What you will gain: an understanding of how pre-rotation protects against identity hijacking by committing to the next key before the current one is compromised, and how multisignature and threshold schemes eliminate single points of failure through shared key control.
Storing and Protecting Private Keys
Goal: Understand the practical options for storing private keys, the trade-offs between them, and the strategies available for recovery if something goes wrong.
| # | Video | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Where to Store Private Keys | Watch |
| 2 | Protecting Private Keys | Watch |
| 3 | Hybrid Key Storage | Watch |
What you will gain: a practical understanding of the spectrum from clear storage to hardware secure modules, how hybrid storage balances security with recoverability, and how social recovery can protect access even if a device is lost.
Introduction to Governance
Goal: Understand what governance is, who the key players are, and why it is just as important as cryptography in building trustworthy digital systems.
| # | Video | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is Governance | Watch |
| 2 | Players in a Governed Ecosystem | Watch |
| 3 | How Governance Ecosystems Assess Risk | Watch |
| 4 | How Governance Ecosystems Develop Requirements | Watch |
What you will gain: a solid understanding of what governance is, who plays which role in a governed ecosystem, how risks are identified and prioritized, and how those risks are translated into enforceable requirements.
Making Governance Work: Conformance and Trust Registries
Goal: Understand how governance ecosystems move from writing rules to enforcing them, and how trust registries make that enforcement queryable and machine-readable.
| # | Video | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | How Conformance Schemes Work | Watch |
| 2 | Trust Registries: Whose DID is it, anyway? | Watch |
| 3 | What Trust Registries Do | Watch |
What you will gain: a concrete understanding of how conformance schemes turn rules into verifiable accountability, and how trust registries serve as the authoritative, queryable backbone that makes digital governance actionable for both humans and software systems.
Privacy-Preserving Verification
Goal: Understand how decentralized identity systems can verify claims and authenticate users while minimizing the personal data that needs to be shared.
| # | Video | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zero Knowledge Proofs | Watch |
What you will gain: an understanding of how zero-knowledge proofs allow a person to prove a specific claim — such as being over a legal age — without revealing any underlying personal data, and why this is becoming a key tool for privacy-preserving identity in decentralized systems.
What Next?
Learn the broader model
Explore concrete outputs
Join the ecosystem
Want to go deeper? Explore the architecture and deliverables behind these concepts. Want to help shape the work? Join a working group. Want the bigger picture? Start with the ToIP model.