Our technological society wants digital identities, but previous attempts undermine the user's right to control their personal information. With the advent of distributed ledgers, it is finally possible to have a digital identity that preserves the best aspects of our offline systems of identification, while also providing significant improvements. This talk will describe the challenges in creating a digital identity, and how the Sovrin network's deployment of Hyperledger Indy overcomes those challenges using open source technologies to implement verifiable credentials. The solution involves more than fancy code, and demonstrates the importance of considering the environment where a technology will function.