How is SSI understood in practice today, compared with the original vision?

Today SSI means a decentralised approach in which people do not depend on a third party during use: they store their identity data securely on their smartphone with cryptography and share it selectively with trustworthy parties.

The original vision forbade any central service or state from owning the identity. The practical reading is less absolute and focuses on where the data lives and who is involved at the moment of use:

• The credential can be issued by an authority (a state, a university, a bank). That is not a contradiction; the authority is what makes the claim trustworthy.
• After issuance, the data is stored locally in the holder's wallet on their phone, protected by cryptographic keys.
• When proving something, the holder sends it directly to the verifier and chooses what to reveal (selective disclosure). The issuer is not contacted.

So "self-sovereign" has shifted from "nobody but me ever issued this" to "nobody but me holds it, and nobody watches me use it". The Swiss E-ID is built on exactly this pragmatic interpretation.

Go deeper:

• Adnovum: Self-Sovereign Identity, how it works — a Swiss practitioner's view of SSI as it is actually deployed.