Dangers of “decentralized” ID systems
paper.wfIdentity (in any meaningful sense) must always delegate trust to some kind of issuing authority. If for no other reason than because any humane system must always accommodate users who forget their passwords, lose their private keys, etc. Key-pairs are ephemeral device tokens, they are not sources of identity.
KYC is in no way any kind of problem that needs to be fixed, it's a necessary and Actually Good feature of any sufficiently broad financial system. Avoiding KYC-type stuff may make sense in the small, but is actively harmful in the large.
More important, I think, is that the issuing authority is also legally obliged to actually give a shit, or else you just get a repeat of the current state of affairs where, for example, forced 2FA and no customer support means homeless people get locked out of all their accounts every time a device fails or is stolen.
Yes, and if there's any easy way to recover from that, then implicitly the identity system can't be used to prevent Sybil attacks/spam, since it would be easy to make a new account when you didn't lose your keys too.
But the article suggests that relying on government issued IDs as a base lets government track all that we do. That's not the case, and is the point with all these systems. It should be possible for instance, using cryptography, to make a distributed chat room service where it's public who has signed up for a chat room, but not who of the posters in it are who.
To be able to selectively prove your identity, including connection to the government-accountable you, without directly involving the government or even anything licensed by the government, would make us more free online, not less.
> Key-pairs are ephemeral device tokens, they are not sources of identity.
If you take "identity" to mean "the same thing", then you can certainly use a key-pair to show that two documents were signed by the same signing key. Of course, the owner could have lost control of their private key, but that could happen to government-issued ID as well.
If you want "identity" to mean "official persona", then there can only be one of those per person, which means government-issued. I think government ID should only be used for interacting with government; online purchases shouldn't rely on government ID.
Banking is awkward. To get a bank account, you usually have to produce government ID. But then the bank issues you with a bank-issued ID, which is effectively just a proxy for your government ID. It's weird because banks are not part of government, but they have quasi-governmental obligations, e.g. KYC. Even government departments do this; to sign up for self-assessment with HMRC, I have to prove I am who I say I am with government ID; but then HMRC issues me with an HMRC ID. That is nuts.
I want to be able to have multiple IDs that are not linked. I shouldn't have to give government ID to make an online purchase. And I shouldn't have to risk exposing my purchase history when I sign a post to an online forum. It's perfectly legal (here, at least) to have multiple real names; for example, I mainly go by my nickname, which doesn't appear on any official document. Online identity should mirror that.
> I want to be able to have multiple IDs that are not linked. I shouldn't have to give government ID to make an online purchase
But how will your benevolent rulers be able to socially gamify your behaviour and direct who gets to interact and mate with you? If social credit systems are to work, we need KYC and centralized ID.
> If social credit systems are to work, we need KYC and centralized ID.
I think we need KYC. That doesn't mean centralized ID. As far as social credit systems is concerned, I take it you are being humorous, but I don't think there's much that's amusing about "social credit".
Only the seller and buyer need to know each other. Anything beyond, is shoe-in for tyranny.
For this you have cash or bartering.
Regulation is not synonymous with tyranny. This is a dumb position and the people who hold it are dumb.
I think your Reddit score should count towards it.
> If you take "identity" to mean "the same thing"
I don't.
> If you want "identity" to mean "official persona"
Well, I want identity to mean me as a human being.
> I want to be able to have multiple IDs that are not linked.
Fine, but realize that statistically zero other people want this feature in, well, anything. No system which expects to serve more than a statistically zero percent slice of humanity can define identity in this way.
The second part of your post seems to contradict the first part, if it's not linked to the government ID how can anyone know if it's the bonafide original and unique persona? And not some duplicate?
> the bonafide original
If you take "the bonafide original" to mean the government-issued ID, then obviously only the government-issued ID is boner-fido. But there's no reason why that should be my only ID; I could, for example, generate my own keypair, and hire a notary public to attest that the holder of the keypair is (select any):
[] Good for ten-grand
[] Older than 18/21
[] The person shown in the accompanying (signed) photo
[] The author of xyz.blog
[] The same person as government-ID xxxxx
Only the last needs to be linked to a government ID, but all the others are authentic, bonafide attestations.
And such an ID would not be a duplicate of anything (not sure why you mentioned duplicates; passports, bus-passes and driving licences can all be duplicated).
Let's say someone is 22, how can they credibly attest to being older than 18/21 without referring to some sort of government record?
Distinguishing a 21-year-old from a 22-year-old without resorting to government records is a challenge, I agree.
They could produce their parents, or any witness of their birth.
They could (if they were born wealthy) produce a hallmarked silver spoon engraved with their name. Not proof, but persuasive.
They could produce their 21-year-old younger sister, who has government ID (yeah, I know, that is a resort to government ID).
Best of all: they could produce a birth certificate, signed by a doctor (not itself government ID, just a prerequisite to getting a government ID).
> They could produce their 21-year-old younger sister, who has government ID (yeah, I know, that is a resort to government ID).
1. How would you verify that's actually their relative and not a friend or stranger? 2. How do you verify that they are in fact the older sibling and not just saying they are?
In 20 years, a 40 year old will need ID to buy cigarettes in the UK ("well you say you're 40, but maybe you're a mature 35 year-old").
> then obviously only the government-issued ID is boner-fido
Never heard of it. Is it an extension of FIDO2?
It's a deliberate mis-pronunciation of "bona-fide" that I snagged from the comedian Dawn French.
>Avoiding KYC-type stuff may make sense in the small, but is actively harmful in the large.
No, it's a trade-off. No KYC makes it possible for people to lose their identity, but it's also the only way to guarantee full privacy/anonymity, and to make it so the identify-provider doesn't have the power to de-platform anyone. Historically speaking, governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts due to forgetfulness etc.
> No KYC ... [is] also the only way to guarantee full privacy/anonymity, and to make it so the identify-provider doesn't have the power to de-platform anyone
Full privacy and anonymity are not virtues. They are actively bad. A system that is fully anonymous always becomes dominated by malicious users. De-platforming is a necessary capability of any system that expects to be used by a non-trivial segment of humanity.
> Historically speaking, governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts due to forgetfulness etc.
This isn't complicated. If I have an account with some money in it, and I lose my private key, then it cannot be the case that I lose access to that money. There must be some phone number I can call, or some person I can reach, which can restore my access to my money. This is a table-stakes property of any system that can ever expect to be used by more than a tiny niche of humanity.
There is a logical error in this statement:
"governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts"
People can not loose their accounts, because they are governed which makes silencing possible.
Bureaucratic malfeasance, error, or just plain bad luck, can loose people their accounts, even with government not silencing them.
e.g. a fly landing on a sheet of paper, blocking the print head long enough to generate "Tuttle" from "Buttle", resulting in a long chain of violent events for some unassuming individual…
Any system that expects to be widely used must delegate trust to some singular and addressable authority, and that authority must be able to remove malicious users (and many other similar things). De-platforming is a feature, not a bug.
> KYC is in no way any kind of problem that needs to be fixed, it's a necessary and Actually Good feature of any sufficiently broad financial system.
I disagree with this because it breaks the notion of innocent until proven guilty that is the cornerstone of a fair justice system. If the bank has any suspicions about where you get your bags of money that you deposit daily, they can inform the police and the police, without questioning you about where you get your money from, must prove that you are doing something illegal.
KYC and all other legislation of the same kind put the burden of proof on you to prove you're a good citizen. And this is wrong on so many levels.
What?
KYC is about establishing identity, not establishing innocence or guilt or goodness or badness. You don't get to participate in society anonymously. That's a feature, not a bug.
> Identity (in any meaningful sense) must always delegate trust to some kind of issuing authority. If for no other reason than because any humane system must always accommodate users who forget their passwords, lose their private keys, etc.
Web of trust protocols are a decades-long solved problem (albeit without a prevailing deployment yet). It seems like your comment is meant to be quietly denigrating toward them (or do I have that wrong?). May I ask why?
It seems like eventually a web of trust model is going to arise and win over a critical mass.
Even in a web of trust, you're delegating trust to someone that you treat as an authority. Especially in practice, where the long-term outcomes of webs of trust tend to be either (1) the scale is nowhere near sufficient due to the effort involved in verification, or (2) you end up de facto trusting some authorities who can provide that scale, at the cost of the identity verification being less meaningful. Sure, it might be easier to cut off or reroute trust if things go south, I don't see us reaching a critical mass for a significant scale any time soon.
> Web of trust protocols are a decades-long solved problem
Solved in a technical sense, maybe, but not in any meaningful sense. Statistically zero people use any web-of-trust based system for anything useful.
But we've already played this game, over the last couple of thousand years. That evolutionary process, however messy it may have been, has already produced a web of trust, to which we all delegate authority and responsibility. It's usually called "government".
That's one of the big reasons why the EU is avoiding using DID.
The author seems unaware that DIDs are now removed from the latest specs from the OIDC Working Group and EU's eIDAS.
Do you have any links where one can read about the removal of DIDs?
Just to clarify: DIDs are not removed from the basic OIDC specs (at least yet!), they're just no longer being considered by the high assurance profiles and EU work as they were deemed unsatisfactory for a lot of reasons, including those OP criticizes (but also due to other basic things like citizens not being able to replace lost "documents" - normally keys - which is a must-have for any serious, widely used identity solution).
I suggest you start here: OpenID for Verifiable Credentials - Overview (https://openid.net/sg/openid4vc/)
There's a link there where it says: "European Digital Identity Architecture and Reference Frameworklists OID4VCI, OID4VP and SIOPv2 as required for certain use-cases"
The basic specs still have DIDs and the w3c VC model, but they're moving away both of those, as it seems... notice how all links to other specs are currently to ISO specs instead:
"The following draft ISO standards reference:"
– draft ISO/IEC TS 23220-4 profiles OID4VP to present mdocs
– draft ISO/IEC TS 18013-7 profiles OID4VP to present mDLs (mobile driving licence)
– draft ISO/IEC TS 23220-3 profiles OID4VCI to issue mdocs
The initial page has a tab with links to the specs... here's a direct link to the main Verifiable Credentials spec (Editor's Draft with latest changes - this can be updated at any time still):
https://openid.github.io/OpenID4VCI/openid-4-verifiable-cred...
This spec still supports formats which require the use of DIDs, but none of these formats are being used by the financial-grade profiles or by the EU's initiatives anymore (the whole ebsi thing seems to be a dead end).
That basically means there will be two very separate worlds: one where DID, w3C and blockchain technologies are used, and another one where OAuth, OIDC, mdocs are used (the one favoured by the EU and financial profiles, e.g. the high-assurance interoperability profile says that keys must be resolved from OIDC well-known metadata endpoints: https://openid.net/specs/openid4vc-high-assurance-interopera...).
I feel like I'm missing some background. Yes, there's been much clamor for forcing use of government IDs recently, but I would hardly call any such system "decentralized", given its reliance on government ID — that seems like an inherently centralized system.
Is someone calling these "decentralized"? To me, decentralized ID is OIDC, which is "being developed" it's mostly not catching on at all, in favor of sadly centralized system like "login with [Google|Facebook]".
Is there some weird crypto-blockchain-something-something that I'm not aware of?
In my working context, a "decentralized" government issued (digital) ID refers to an identity whose verification does not require a connection to the government server (e.g. verification is done by public key cryptography). So the government always has to participate in the issuance of that digital ID, but it doesn't know when and where you have used your identity. ISO/IEC 18013-5 is an example of this type.
By contrast, a "centralized" digital ID phones home every time it presents and verifies. I don't know any standards, but most digital identities in China are of this form.
Identification based on a Certificate Authority is fundamentally centralized.
The CA is a single point of failure that can arbitrarily issue or fail to issue an identity certificate.
If you use lots of interchangeable CAs, then it “fails open”, in that any one CA can issue certificates for everyone. That’s still a single point of failure.
If you tie the ID to the Certificate Authority (e.g. gmail offers certs for gmail addresses), each person still is impacted by some single point of failure.
I’d say all these schemes are centralized.
I’d call the things you describe “offline identity verification”, though there is an additional nuance: the scheme could work offline, but still send a log of what happens when it reconnects. With that, the privacy properties are as bad as online schemes.
"Offline" seems like a better descriptor than "decentralized" in that case.
I think OIDC is more "federated" than "decentralized"
I have no idea what the bitcoin people mean by decentralized. It sounds like PKI with extra steps. shrug
Government IDs in general are decentralized in a sense that there is more than one issuing authority. People really love to overbuild capabilities when designing this stuff -- digital signing chain of trust, blockchain, contact-less verification through nfc or qr codes in a phone. Nobody uses that except government itself and most of the time they have the data in their demographic database, then still make a paper copy if ID and make you sign it so pinning you for fraud is an option later.
Everybody else just looks at poorly-photographed jpeg and is like "yes, this dude is named like this". Even banks this days open accounts without ever touching sacred piece of plastic with human hands, let alone scanning it with crypto-mumbo-jumbo.
OIDC has very much “caught on” in business contexts. Large organizations end up with hundreds or thousands of independent internal tools, many hosted externally. OIDC and SAML are common protocols for centralizing employee authentication and governance.
It’s not really “OIDC”, though, because there’s so many options possible that the standard itself is basically useless: you have to implement Google, Microsoft, Okta, etc. separately anyways
OIDC has for sure caught on. I've worked in multiple roles where very smart identity-centric people consider it the best option.
> But why do you need to verify a name? Why not take someone at their word, and allow them to choose what name they want to use? Why do all actions need to be linked to a single persistent physical identity?
Why indeed.
There is an adventure novel "The Count of Monte Cristo" in which, as a small subplot, two ex-convicts are made to pose as Italian nobility in the Parisian upper society. Of course, nobody would believe such claims just on their own word for obvious reasons, which is why an "introduction to the society" was a custom. It still could be faked, of course, which is exactly what happened.
Also, why link it all to a single persistent physical identity? Because, no matter how many digital identities you use, you are still a single physical person, and it's actually noticeable.
The count gives both of them a significant line of credit: money overcomes much suspicion of this pair. Their assumed identities are a weapon, and I do not think the scam they are parties to helps your case.
Well, "their assumed identities are a weapon" is precisely my case, and I don't even argue that G.I. identification is actually that great of a solution.
The con tricks are as old as humanity, even if they take different forms in different eras, but the ground problem is the same: if someone approcaches you and claims to be e.g. an important noble named such and such from the overseas, they could very well be telling truth—or they could be lying, and there is almost no way to tell for certain, even though there are some good heuristics (their wealth is one, as you allude to).
People believe in them because the count backs them. It's totally facilitated by the count. He's like a corrupt CA signing the diginotar certificate
Byt why did people believe the count? IIRC, he had pulled some quite elaborate scheme to get the recognition and respect in the Paris, and he was also introduced there by Albert de Morcerf.
> With a web-of-trust, friends or family could vouch for your name, age or location; landlords could vouch for your address; employers could vouch for your skills; customers could vouch for businesses; and so on. As it doesn’t rely on government databases, but rather the people you know, it is truly decentralized and accessible.
This is literally how it works in majority of the real world; except for things where government has a role to play; most common case is taxes. If you are a landlord and collect rent from tenant and if either of you want to make tax related claims to the government, then you will have to provide/quote each other's government recognized identity in your tax returns.
For large parts of the population in the lower socio-economic strata, even this won't be relevant. And that reliance on that web-of-trust is the problem for them due to class discrimination etc. Hence, having a government issued identity (as a universal right) which acts as an anchor to which trusted attestations can be attached to is critical to make a difference in the life of the last person in that socio-economic line.
This is in essence the basis for India's identity system Aadhaar[1] – which is super minimal identity system – just biometrics (fingerprint, iris scan, head/shoulder photo, gender) – mapped to a a 12 digit number (basically a unique key in its database); plus 3 additional demographic fields – name, age (date of birth), address – which require external anchor proofs (which are very weak proofs). Here's the full list of accepted proofs - https://uidai.gov.in/images/commdoc/valid_documents_list.pdf
Key management & binding keys to identities is one of the hard problems in cryptography.
Cryptocurrency and friends really have no bearing on the problem. The known solutions are the same as they always were - web of trust, pki, tofu, pre-shared keys, or just give up and ignore the outside world. All have tradeoffs and are very far from satisfactory.
If you take a subpar solution and wrap it in 10 layers of cryptocurrency and magical thinking, you are just left with a complex version of the same subpar solution.
Yep. There is no silverbullet. All these systems are doing are just increasing areas where a vulnerability in logic can happen.
It must be tied to person's biological features, i don't see any other way. Some kind of crypto-bio hash
Even then you still have problems with revocation.
If someone steals my passport, i tell the gov and they cancel the old one. If someone steals your fingerprint, you are just screwed.
There are some systems that verify things like bloodflow to ensure that the finger belongs to a live person instead of a cut-off hand. However then you end up having the problem of needing to trust hardware, which is fine for an iphone unlock feature but not so fine for this magical decentralized web3 stuff.
Do biometrics use actual fingerprints or biometric template? I.e. you can revoke template and issue a new one?
It's fine to trust hardware if you, as a party who performs the check, installed and paid for said hardware. The problem comes when somebody else has to judge whether you performed the check correctly and trust you.
Agreed, i need look more into this
Its definitely a really hard problem.
I think fundamentally the issue is you can't create trust out of nothing. Once you have something you trust, you can use cryptography to extend that trust in all sorts of complex ways. However you always need a starting point to bootstrap the system.
I feel like there is a big connection between this problem and trying to prove things in pure logic.
PKI is basically starting from axioms (i trust the following CA's as a starting point)
Tofu is the reflexive property - we know that x=x
Web of trust is some sort of coherence model (in the sense of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherentism )
I think to make real progress on this problem, we need to make progress in epistomology.
Biological credentials could work even without revocation if you use a lot of them simultaneously.
It would be like asking for many usernames that are semi public instead of a username and password.
e.g. multiple fingerprints plus iris scan plus voice print plus facial scan.
So even if a few get stolen and successfully replicated somehow to fool the system into thinking it's a living person, it still won't be enough to steal the identity.
You can't revoke biological credentials though, at least not if you want the holder if those credentials to participate in your system
Polykey is an open-source, decentralized secrets management solution that uses GitHub as an identity provider (IDP). During the initial setup—akin to creating a new digital wallet—users authenticate and claim their GitHub identity via the Polykey CLI. This step binds their Polykey node to their GitHub profile, verifiable through a publicly visible cryptolink called a "gestalt identity" displayed on their GitHub user profile or gists.
Within the Polykey network, each node can host vaults that safeguard sensitive information. By integrating identity verification directly into this decentralized framework, Polykey enables users to discover, trust, and securely share cryptographic keys with other verified nodes. This system departs from traditional methods that depend on anonymized wallet addresses for user discovery, offering instead a mechanism for direct interaction within users’ operational environments, provided their identities have been linked to their nodes.
This approach aims to tackle foundational challenges in key management and identity binding. Do you think integrating identity verification in this way could improve the management and security of cryptographic identities? Are there any potential advantages or drawbacks you foresee with this model?
Congrats, you reinvented PKI.
If it works for your usecase, great. But lets not pretend its any different from the things we were doing in the 90s.
Not only that, but reinvented it way worse… now it depends on GitHub (aka Microsoft).
We didn't reinvent shit! Everything we did is built off existing tech.
We reused PKI and extended it to achieve peer to peer web of trust. So there's both vertical trust chains via certificate signing and horizontal trust chains via a sigchain.
While being slightly more generous than my sibling comment:
If you’ve got a peer-to-peer network of information nodes, where each person is able to assert information about themselves in their node, but the whole trust is based on the polykey binding at setup, I see 3 key challenges:
1) Where’s the real world verification of any identity attributes stored in the node? 2) How do we detect when/if the root key has been compromised, allowing arbitrary new vaults and identity attributes to be automatically trusted within the network?
3) How does this meaningfully improve the experience over having a CA sign a certificate that contains attributes about you? (sibling poster’s argument).
1) Real world verification is voluntary. Nothing is forcing anybody to provide real world information. Users can decide to do so by claiming a real world identity - in which the verification is outsourced to that IdP. Users can also decide who to trust based on what information is available on the network.
2) Root key compromise can be resolved through revocations on the trust network. It's the same as how PKI works right now but in a decentralized manner. This isn't possible yet on PolyKey (PK) but it's something we are working on.
3) Actually we enable CAs to sign the PK certificate. This is in our roadmap.
I’ve previously worked heavily in digital identity and continue to talk from time to time on it - I honestly can’t see any value to this. It’s worse in some dimensions than existing systems (certificates can at least be validated offline) and offers no upsides (assertion of identity validity is the hard and valuable part).
I’d do a deep dive on verifiable credentials and ask yourself truthfully what PolyKey offers to both users and relying parties.
This entire article is just wrongly conflating Verifiable Credentials (VCs) with DIDs and then citing those false conflations as weaknesses of DID.
> If decentralized ID is just an extension of the existing government ID system, it provides neither privacy nor financial inclusion.
VC is a spec built on top of DID, in no way shape or form is VC required for DID.
This statement alone shows the author doesn't understand (or is intentionally misrepresenting) the relationship between DID and VC (which is kind of crucial to write an entire blog post on either topic)
Also, the other points made aren't the reason VC was conceived.
> And just like the existing system, it continues to exclude millions of people who can’t get government ID
VC is a technology for convenience, not solving social problems. It's basically just to enable technologies like Tap to Pay but for your Gov IDs.
E.g. rather than having to carry your drivers license you just carry your phone. It's almost as if the article misses the entire purpose for which VC is designed (but then again, what can one expect when they're criticizing DIDs yet -actually- talking about VC throughout the entire post)
I reject any system that will require me to carry a phone. Phones are expensive, brittle, and annoying. Biometric is far better.
I would much rather buy a new phone than stand in the DMV if I lost my driver's license. I thought I lost mine days ago and was ready to hop on TaskRabbit to employ a line stander.
Also, biometrics to verify ID? Hard pass. Would rather not have to be fingerprinted or swabbed at the gas station for cancer sticks.
You can't change your biometric password.
Thank you, I thought I was going crazy reading it. I've been out of the DID space for a number of years now, but I made contributions to the concept when it was first proposed. I don't remember it having anything to do government credentials at the time. It seems the VC addition is a later thing?
The US is an odd case where there is no central government ID or identification base layer. There are many independent authorities that can issue an ID, none of which are universally provisioned or recognized by governments within the country. This creates enough edge cases that it is essentially required to be possible to bootstrap an identity from negligible formal documentation, which is also a rather large loophole.
> The US is an odd case where there is no central government ID or identification base layer.
As others have mentioned, the US Federal government issues passports and passport cards, yet it's entirely up to the agency that wants ID what IDs they will accept. I've been turned down for using a passport card for some Washington State government activities ("the card doesn't have a signature"), using a passport to buy an age-restricted item from a store ("we can't scan it"), and a passport card with the state's largest credit union ("too much fraud with passport cards").
Yet none of these are documented anywhere. Everyone just assumes you'll have a state-issued driver license and if you don't, well, you're obviously up to something nefarious. (Before anyone asks, I do have a state-issued enhanced identification card. It looks identical to a driver license, except it says "identification" on it. I've still been told "that's not a driver's license, I can't take that.")
I use a Federal ID when dealing with legal purviews of the Federal government, and a State ID when dealing with the legal purviews of State governments (which is most things). This is the only reliable scheme I've found. As a matter of Constitutionality, the States are largely required to recognize State IDs, but no one is required to recognize Federal IDs because there is no authority and as a practical matter many governments don't.
It doesn't help that some clerks are confused by the zoo of government issued IDs that exist in the US. IDs in the US are a mess, the legal barriers to making it possible to have an organized identity system are very high, and both the Democrats and Republicans are resistant to removing those legal barriers, so this situation is unlikely to change.
Real ID has more or less happened. States still issue IDs that don't meet those requirements, but at some point it's likely enough to actually become a requirement for using the ID to fly (instead of being delayed again).
The ID standardization parts mostly happened. The parts where the underlying State databases are shared with a central Federal government database did not.
There's a data sharing system, it isn't clear if it is entirely functionally equivalent to a centralized database, but it certainly goes in that direction if you compare it to not having a sharing system.
And even then, most of us can do a ton of damage just knowing the last 4 of someones social security number, and their bithday.
Australia is the same. Even accessing federal systems involves a baroque system of multi-credential attestation where you nominally have a single “GovId” but in practice you have to jump through a bunch of hoops on a per-agency basis. The GovId itself is a weird amalgam of “n-of-m” identity papers.
This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it.
The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.”
Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers.
> Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers.
How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this? If you have an ID card issued by e.g. your brokerage, it can use strong cryptography and be no easier to forge than any government ID. If you lost your card you could use any mechanism you could use in the event that you lose your government ID. Some of these methods have poor security properties but that's the same in both cases.
The only thing you get from centralization is non-consensual tracking.
> How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this?
To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits. (Prior to that, you just had to put down how many children you were claiming benefits for.)
If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages?
It always boils down to the same thing: Someone, somewhere has to have a table with a primary key on it.
> To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits.
The assumption here is that they're all fake rather than there being a non-trivial number of people who don't understand how to fill out the new forms, or aren't willing to admit to an association with an out-of-wedlock child on an official form even though the child is real and actually being supported etc.
> If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages?
Nobody other than the brokerage uses the brokerage's ID. That's what decentralized is. Children typically wouldn't have an ID from a brokerage anyway. The welfare agency would provide recipients with its own IDs. How does it establish uniqueness for this? The same way as the institution issuing a Tax File Number.
> This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it.
This is similar to how the U.S. has a certain amount of opposition from Christian sects who believe any sort of national ID number would be the biblical mark of the beast. There’s a certain dark humor in the way privacy is used to complain about identification cards but that only leads to the semi-regulated private data brokers being used by everyone, including the government, with purchased access to far more data.
In the US, significant fractions of both the Democrat and Republican parties are against anything that resembles a single national ID, for different longstanding reasons. And the legal hurdles are high enough that it would require both parties actively working together to effect material change, so even if one of them had a change of heart it wouldn't matter.
> geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it.
Isn’t the CCP’s behaviour still one of the best arguments against universal government ID?
No. In fact the entire thing that makes Chinese surveillance so bad is that they don't need an ID to identify you
Universal government ID allows your identity to be very efficiently communicated between different public/private sector agencies.
That's how your local CCTV camera catching you jaywalking could communicate to your bank that you should be fined.
I cannot fathom the error in logic that yields the conclusion that elected governments having a SQL table with a primary key constraint is somehow "the same thing" as the authoritarian abuses of power by a single-party communist dictatorship.
A number on a piece of paper is not the root cause of secret police brutally cracking down on dissidents!
The possession of power and the misuse of power are of course different things.
But knowledge of the full population is particularly corrosive kind of power. It can reveal negative information - one can query for all people without a donation to political party, for example.
Only if that data is in the same table.
The primary key is just a number, and tells you nothing other than perhaps roughly when you were born (if it is sequentially allocated).
>The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.”
The logic is actually "That which I wish to control or destroy, I must first enumerate/name."
A Government that exists only to administer (and not control the populace), has no need to know who all it's citizen's are. Merely to know who is involved in the limited processes being administered.
Sadly, all common sense around that seems to have evaporated since 2001 in the U.S. It seems like only those of us left who experienced the pre-9/11 world are doing a terrible job at instilling a picture of a government that's not all "Big Brother is watching" in the younger generations. The gluttony of Law Enforcement and the IC for a Single Identification Number to unify and enumerate every flesh and blood person wandering around cannot be overstated.
"You can't improve(manage) that which you can't measure."
In practice, all government departments in all countries have databases with primary key identifiers in them.
We can do this accurately and efficiently, or we can continue to insist on doing it inaccurately and inefficiently because of "Red Scare" propaganda.
You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption.
I prefer my government agencies to not waste my time, not confuse me with similarly named people, etc...
This is a real problem that occurs every day, versus the slippery-slope arguments that derive from anti-communist hysteria.
Here's a real situation: Identical twins with the same name, because "John Sr is the son of John Sr for ten generations, and he didn't want to give up the tradition just because he had twins." That's a real story from a public school system where the kids were living at the same address, attending the same school, were born on the same day, in the same hospital, etc...
How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?
>You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption.
It's a fair trade off if your target KPI is having zero genocides enabled by extensive records-keeping.
The US did not require any data crunching from IBM or anyone else to genocide the Indians.
The entire line of thought is straight up propaganda from weird Christians who have a really weird cult belief that some id number is the mark of the beast and saw a great opportunity to lie about the holocaust (plenty of jews were murdered using no better data than "Wilhelm says he saw them praying last Saturday").
You can see the same stupidity in the talking point from 2nd amendment maximalists that the jews were only genocided because they gave up rights to own guns, or something to that effect, as if a population experiencing genocide would have qualms about illegal firearms.
If you think the lack of records-keeping is protection against genocide, or has ever prevented one in the history of the world, then I have some bad news for you.
>How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?
Yep. That's how. Now lets see what inevitably gets built once you do that.
Now do you that mapping to a Federal system, which maps that ID to a set of tables including a map to every other every other organization's ids relevant to that individual such that one can essentially completely hose someone via the "Sanction this individual in particular where (subquery). This system has already been built in the Financial sector, it's called OFAC. More advanced integrations are in progress. Look up "Fusion Centers".
Do I think that's a worthy trade in case that gets in the wrong hands? Fuck no.
Should those same systems be free to be "privately built and transacted for business purposes" in a way that utterly sidesteps prohibitions against the Government directly building that dataset themselves, resulting in 3rd party SaaS queries through Data Brokers? See LexisNexis, Palantir, or any of the Credit Bureaus or other data brokers. Also telecoms selling location data. Or automotive manufacturers feeding telematics to insurers or Law Enforcement.
Worthy trade for the risk? ?Hell no.
You can have a world where nightmare abuses of these types of systems are outright impossible, or you can have a world that's incrementally more efficient, but you must accept these abuses being realizable. That's an XOR there. There is no escaping it.
Certainty of abuse has probability 1. How do I know? Because I've been tempted to do as much before, and I know that I am an uncharacteristically extreme example of someone that thinks something through before committing to it, and it's only by doing so that I've managed to avoid implementing that very thing. 98% of people will not hold themselves to at least the the rigor I have. There are people far too pragmatic to be bothered by such things as ideals or edge cases; which is necessary to deal with when you're talking about enabling top down practicable social targeting systems. We are not special. It will not be different this time. Our nature is not such that we can safely discount these sorts of things.
The enemy is among us, and they are us. I don't fear communists. I fear the paperclip maximizing zealots among us who will sacrifice everything in pursuit of thrir goal. I've been one of them.
I will not subject those down the road to a working Panopticon. I will not build that lever. I'm sorry. I will consign you to a fate wherein you suffer from an occasional bureacratic mixup, but you will never once need worry that some madman is sitting on the button that causes you to lose access to everything instantly. That will allow a faceless bureaucracy to control your access in real time. To know your every move, all the time. I'd rather you be free. That you be unmanageable. That the mechanisms of external social coercion not be perfect. For without those spaces, there is no room for freedom. Only not currently having your chain jerked. Know that if ever you are subdued by the machinations of the technophile, it will not have been I that forged those chains.
Just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should.
Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean you should build the yardstick.
It does not follow that something you can't currently measure must have a measure built, and then as a consequence of it's measurability then be managed.
Those that seek power will beseech you to build these things for them. It is your job to see these things for what they are, and learn to be able to say "No."
Maybe the US is just particularly broken? It is not like countries with robust, state-run ID systems are all some sort of dictatorial or even data hellscape.
From my point of view it's a theoretical gamble. Canada, the U.S.'s neighbor to the north, already abised their OFAC equivalent against people protesting the actions of their Federal Government. Whether you agreed with why the people were protesting, think about that really, really, hard*. Your access to every asset cut off for what amounts to a political issue. At no other time in history, has such an action been possible in so short a time. At no point in time has one sitting in a chair on the other side of the country can completely change your life situation with a tap of the enter key.
We only have these systems implemented currently in places like finance or immigration, or National Civil Service, but by and large, most people are relatively ignorant of the increasingly broad reach of these systems, while at the same time, these systems grow to become more and more attractive targets for both hostile subversion, or just those seeking a means to power.
Historically, we had in built safeties to these sorts of systems because they consisted largely of individual human beings. Each component weighing in in such a way where even the most extreme individual at the top setting off the action potential would on average be damped. Either by non-cooperation of constituent parts (conscientious objection), dropping of signal (not enough people or resources to execute).
With computerization, we're removing more and more of that damping; we're entering a phase of civilization where we're increasingly in danger of our technological capability outstripping our civilizational capability to introspect all the links in the chain for one, and to restore things. It ain't a case of "a man can't do much damage in 4 years" anymore.
Propaganda is a very effective tool. People internalise it to the point that it becomes a part of their personal identity, and it becomes a part of the ambient societal discourse. It's like the air you breathe. You don't even realise that you're breathing until someone tells you that you are.
Conversely, it is trivial to identify foreigners influenced by propaganda. You see the effect, but are not subject to the cause. It's like seeing a fish in a body water. You immediately think to yourself: "There's a fish in the water", but the fish doesn't think it's swimming in water. If you could ask it somehow, it would ask: "What is water?"
PS: There are quite a few topics like this where if you ask any American, you get some specific propaganda in response, but if you ask literally anybody else on the entire planet -- the other 96% of the human population -- you'll get slow blinking and maybe a "wtf!?" instead.
E.g.: Iraq caused 9/11, gun control, states-rights, and publicly-funded ("free") healthcare.
All three of them are very heavily propogandised for decades now by very-well funded lobby groups... in the US. Elsewhere people are like: "No, the Saudis did!", "Illegal!", "Wat!?", and "Of course!"
proof that humans are just stochastic parrots as well
Sigh. I'm fully aware the propaganda of which you speak. Thank you very much. Yes, I know it's origins. No, it is not the stem of my dislike of these systems. Please stop trying to reduce it to "crazy American Red Scare mumbo jumbo".
I have spent decades watching the ways human beings interact with and use computers. I've made it my life's work to pick apart technological systems and how they have been applied to societal problems, and what the various outcomes are.
It is a fact that automation which removes dependence on other humans acts as a power multiplier to it's owner. It is a fact that as we remove more individual actors from things, decisions will be skewed more and more to the extremes of the component actors of the system. It is a fact that since the industrial revolution, and the introduction of industrial business machines, the acts of artifice and processes we are capable of creating have become more and more capable of facilitating industry fuelled process pipelines capable of generating great casualties. The last century having some very shining examples of how things can go wrong, and the bloody U.S. from 2016-2020 having gone through it's first brush with a certifiable psychopath in the Chief Executive seat.
I have had the everloving shit scared out of me, and much of my naive techno-optimism knocked out of me. I've now had a shining example of "what could a smart psychotic, amoral person do with this system" added to my "should I make this system?" calculus.
I look at cases of "everything is just fine..." non-U.S. posters entertain, and I just end up affixing "for now. Your psychopath in charge just hasn't come up yet.
India has it's Modi. China jas Xi. Putin's saber rattling again. Britain is chasing itself through fear into becoming what Orwell had nightmares of more and more every year. I listen to elders who think that "oh, just trust everyone else", that I then half to clean up the mess of afterward when their implicit trust in others ends up being violated.
I wish my misgivings were as easy to cure as innoculation to Red Scare propaganda. That was easy. I saw through that before getting out of middle school. This is much harder. My generation hasn't faired well in managing to build trust or emotional stability which scares the crap out of me for the odds of not leveraging technical advancement to unmake something beautiful that ultimately I still believe, or try to believe in. I love the American Experiment. I want to believe we are by and large good, virtuous, and comparatively enlightened people capable of maintaining a government that places as a priority maintaining a state of Liberty without degenerating into a mess social control mechanisms laying around waiting for the sufficiently motivated and intelligent psychopaths to pick up and orchestrate.
So again, sorry to bust your bubble. I could write volumes on this topic, but I don't feel like letting this degenerate into rambling anymore than it already has.
why doesn’t a passport count? or do you mean, no central ID that is the only acceptable ID for various services
>why doesn’t a passport count?
In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka "green card" holders) can't get passports. They can get state-level drivers licenses but only citizens can get passports from the centralized-level Federal government.
> In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka "green card" holders) can't get passports.
Is there a reason they can't get a passport from their country of citizenship?
Plus, passports are fully standardized, at least the biometric ones are. It's possible to read and verify the data on a biometric passport entirely offline using open source applications that implement the documented processes.
Presumably they can but it won't prove their legal status in the US, assuming the local government even recognises it as a legal form if ID
Greencards have a MRZ just like passports though.
Green cards are effectively entry-only passports (from the perspective of the US). You can enter the country by land with just the GC with no passport. Additionally, if you arrive by air and you have global entry they don't look at your passport at all, just the GC.
> In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka “green card” holders) can’t get passports.
Yes, but legal permanent residents (and some other legally resident aliens) also have federally-issued ID, and its not optional the way passports are for citizens. (For LPRs, the Permanent Resident Card, for others the Employment Authorization Document or Immigrant Visa.)
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't the green card already a federally issued, nationally recognised photo ID?
Yes but they definitely have centralized id - the 'Alien Registration Card' itself. Technically, lawful permanent residents are supposed to carry it at all times.
How did the green card holder enter the USA without a valid ID / passport?
Well, they probably didn’t do so with a valid US ID, and certainly not with a valid US passport.
A passport is an ID. However, it is not mandatory and some State governments do not recognize it as a valid ID for legal purposes. In the US, the power to issue authoritative IDs resides with the individual States, not the Federal government, which creates many interesting edge cases.
some State governments do not recognize it as a valid ID for legal purposes.
Do you know which state governments?
I don't believe this is true, and the reason I don't is that this question nerdsniped me and I looked up every state and found that they all, every one of them, including the ones that made me click into PDFs to verify the fact, accept passports as identification in order to obtain Real ID drivers licenses.
(Also I have writers block).
Hah, thanks, I sort of suspected as much, weird as US id stuff is. Like if you'd told me 20+ years ago that the federal government can't get states to standardize their ids even in full anti-terrorism super saiyan mode, I'd have thought that was bullshit too.
I think you greatly underestimate the number of people that do not have a passport.
I recognize that percentage-wise, dissapointingly few US citizens have passports. I suppose it's more linked to economic status than anything else.
But I was merely rebutting the parent's statement that there is no centrally issued ID in the USA, in the context of ironic use for a base layer for "decentralized" identity.
It's too bad the article focused on that nonsense instead of, what good is a decentralized identity -- if it can't assert your actual physical identity.
I think "The state won’t give up its monopoly on identity" is the most violently american sentence I read in the whole year.
together with "I'm only traveling" and appearing on some YT video on roadstops with predictable but hilarious consequences
I am who they say I am.
Who gets to choose the they?
If you choose to request and receive "their" services then "they" get a say. Thus, if you use stuff like roads, schools, ambulances, airports, insurances, or the police, then you are part of the society. Of course you can retreat in a forest and use none of those, then you have a valid point in rejecting central authorities, but only then.
Now I need to have an ID to bike down a road, ride a bus, report a crime?
Do they also have a right to build a database of every time I utilize my ID? What's stopping them?
I think there is already a large group of people who would prefer to live in a society without ceding that much power to a centralized authority.
Any ID system that isn't just totally run be each individual themselves is ceding power to someone.
Whether you need an ID to do certain things or are tracked doing certain things is also a very separate issue.
What is stopping "them" is that "them" in liberal democracies (as a technical term) isn't free to do whatever they please nor beyond control/recall/etc. If you want to live in a society, there will be rules, implicit or explicit, on how people interact, delegate, etc.
It’s a reference to Weber.
I understand its shallow of me, but I stopped reading exactly here.
Your government needs to know who everybody is. That means illegal immigrants can't get drivers licenses, and that's kind of the point.
> Even IDs for undocumented people (such as Californian AB 60 driver’s licenses) require a foreign passport, national ID card or birth certificate, and can’t help people who have no state-issued identity documents at all.
> This existing ID system is harmful, inaccessible and a single point of failure
having a cryptographic government-backed digital ID could really be a great and privacy-preserving feature of modern society. for example: ZK proofs are now practical, and could improve upon the status quo of sending a digital JPG of a scan of your passport to a third party for some arbitrary verification.
The post reads a little bit overblown.
I'm not sure that would work all that well to be honest.
Seems to me, the whole reason ID cards have photos on is because they get lost/stolen/borrowed all the time.
Even if the government had the inclination to run a big national IT project so I could use zero knowledge proofs to verify my age for pornhub by scanning my driving license NFC chip, they'd still end up needing a webcam face check to make sure I wasn't some kid using dad's driving license. At which point the privacy angle becomes a joke anyway.
Yes but having a fake card is an entirely different animal to deal with.
I will never upload photographs of my government-issued photo ID for any reason. I will never utilize any gov-backed digital ID.
I will go down screaming, fighting, kicking, biting, and faxing my tax returns to the IRS, really doing everything lawful in my power to drag the whole system to a halt if digital ID gets forced on me. I don't care if I have to write a script that's going to trade bitcoin 800 times a second on 12 different exchanges, I don't care if I have to make my tax return 200,000 pages long and deliberately reorder the stack so that every single sheet is out of order, and it's all in a font that was deliberately chosen to be incompatible with OCR systems. If the US government will let me submit my tax returns in Farsi, Urdu, or Esperanto, or some other obscure language that the IRS would need to hire someone to translate, I will, just to add all of the absolute maximum pain, inefficiency, and suffering into this process.
Keep pushing this shit on people who don't want it. Malicious compliance is like reflected DDoS attacks with huge asymmetric I/O sizes: I alone can easily force the government to waste 10,000+ hours of effort for each hour I put in, and what's more, I can and will write tutorials, open source all of this, and advertise it everywhere if digital ID does get forced on society.
Problem with this? Stop pushing digital ID or start pushing to let me renounce my American citizenship without posessing another citizenship.
Digital ID that I’m describing would be a way to avoid the current awful status quo of uploading your passport online (which, in the UK, has become common for things like banking, immigration, and other services). I’m not sure what your issue is.
My issue is caring about my constitutional (natural) rights (which cannot be granted by a government, as they are natural; they can only be infringed upon by government), but I wouldn't expect you to understand, being in a place where blind subservience to a literal monarchy is what defined the values of the society you live in.
One thing that is worth mentioning is the idea of a “private life” really hasn’t ever existed. Even before the internet and computers, banks still held records of customer identity, merchants would still track their customers and what they bought, and the government could still take those records with a warrant. Even before then in pre industrial or rural areas, people would generally know who the people around them were and would regularly discuss what others were doing.
The idea of a completely anonymous citizen that can bank, buy, and talk with others with full control of what other people know about them is pretty much a modern invention and is slowly disappearing again and society adapts to a technological world.
The problem is; it used to take lots of real effort and therefore expense to investigate those facts. The results are now worth far more, and the cost is now far less.
That is a change in the structure, the unwritten expectations of society, that I agree we should resist that change.
The previously unwritten expectations should be codified into rules that should be followed.
These "gaslighters" seem to show up to many discussion to say "what's the big deal, it's always been that way" when it obviously hasn't. I guess it's people who want the change and are trying to justify it?
Anyway, a good analogy is photo radar. Speed limits are set knowing everybody speeds. We could now easily enforce them everywhere. But if we do, we need to raise them to an appropriate level, not the "we know you're breaking them" level. Same with what you're saying about privacy, as the cost of invading it goes down, we need different controls, we can't just be cool with it because it was always hypothetically possible to hire a private investigator to stalk someone.
> We could now easily enforce them everywhere
We do. Approved half a decade ago - https://www.sae.org/news/2019/04/eu-to-mandate-intelligent-s...
> We need to raise them to an appropriate level I do not know what most people would find an appropriate level (I for one would prefer the current level, you would prefer a raised level).
Somehow I feel the same about all the privacy discussions. Are people really understanding and would be impacted in the same why by privacy issues or is this just a fight between various interests with no connection with the actual people?
To give an (extreme) example: without social networks elections will be influenced by newspapers and television. Would "the actual person" be much better of because he is influenced "by different people"?
Sometimes I wonder how it would be if some things would be less private. (for example if wealth information would be less private, would it be harder for some people to do "dubious stuff", from straight illegal, to huge bonuses, etc.). I mean look at open source - is open source a result of "let's keep everything private and separate" idea or exactly the opposite... ?
Radical transparancy only works in a world of radical acceptance. I deliberately hide some stuff I do from some people not because it is shady but because it will impact their view of me in a negative way.
In my grandma's village everyone knew that a neighbor was cheating, who got pregnant, and details about every single person in the village. Nowadays it's easy to track which websites I go to, but none of my neighbors have any clue about what I'm up to.
With this in mind, outright calling people that notice this gaslighters is immature. Make your point or don't.
You've literally just pointed out the difference between the people who used to know what you're up to, and the people who now know what you're up to.
Anyone trying to convince you there is no difference between the two states is trying to make you ignore that difference in the world, and convince you that your perception of that difference is faulty or mistaken.
How is that not gaslighting?
But - the difference in effect is that, under the old system, the government could not immediately get a summary of that information from everyone in the village, and do so without possibility of word getting back to you. Nor could a prospective employer. Or a bank manager. Or someone half-way round the world wanting to scam you out of your life savings. Or someone wanting to run for political office. Or someone wanting to persecute cheaters/unwed mothers/"sexual deviants"/etc... for personal gain.
Yeah, back then your private life might not have been private, strictly speaking. But at least it wasn't for sale, in bulk, at bargain basement prices, to anyone looking for any kind of leverage over you.
The only reason it is disappearing is the government keeps mandating surveillance. Anti-money laundering and know your customer are just the financial arm of global mass surveillance. They just say "terrorists" and suddenly everything is justified. Everyone just accepts it. Just an fact of life that you have to do all this bookkeeping when you have a business. In fact, such things should be literally illegal. This is just some loophole the government uses to illegally surveil its citizens. It's illegal to warrantlessly wiretap everyone so they get the private sector to do it for them. Then all they need to do is gently ask the corporations. The CEOs are only too happy to get in bed with them.
The bitter pill to swallow is society needs to learn to tolerate some amount of crime in order to maintain their freedom. They want the government to be all powerful so that it can stop crime before it even happens. They don't want the responsibility for themselves. The responsibility that freedom requires, the responsibility to personally defend themselves when the bad guys come knocking. No, they want to delegate it all to some authorities. They better hope they don't end up as serfs in somebody's fiefdom.
>The bitter pill to swallow is society needs to learn to tolerate some amount of crime in order to maintain their freedom.
I would go a step further and say that society needs some level of crime in order to gain freedoms, not just keep the ones they have. As a thought experiment, imagine you had a machine that would magically prevent anyone who would violate the law from doing so from the moment its activated for the rest of time. Is there any point in all of history that you think would be a good time to activate that machine? Certainly you would want to avoid activating it any time that slavery was legal. Probably be a good idea to skip the world wars era. Civil rights era would be another good time to avoid. The Troubles wouldn't be a great time either I wouldn't think. And if you believe in the benefits of medical usage of various schedule I drugs, I wouldn't recommend turning it on today either.
Sure, a reduction in crime might be a great thing for society, and there's no telling how many lives would be improved if truly bad people were prevented from doing their crimes. But the flip side of that is I can't think of a single point in history where some group or action was criminalized that later turned out to be something that should not have been so. And I don't have faith that we'd make nearly as much progress on things without people willing to break the law and bring those injustices to our attention.
Great example! Thanks.
> The responsibility that freedom requires, the responsibility to personally defend themselves when the bad guys come knocking.
I invite you to live in Haiti for a little while and then come back and let us know how that went for you.
Why would anyone do that?
Gotta actually have something worth defending in order to justify risking one's life. A family, a community, a nation. Even if you told me I could bring an entire army with me, I wouldn't step foot there. There's nothing in there for me.
I'm reading the article as essentially saying "decentralised ID's dosen't solve anything".
If you have them "backed" with governmentally issued ID's, they allow the government ID monopoly to continue (with all its claimed faults). If they are instead completely separate they will not be considered "valid" in most situations where ID's are required.
Then the author warn against the whole idea of having one, single, strong identifier connected to your person at all, and urges for the option of creating multiple identities.
In almost all circumstances where identification is required, the whole point of requiring ID falls apart of you can create a new one whenever you want. We can of course argue that the whole surveillance society is wrong. KYC requirements, no fly lists, credit scores etc, but any proposed system need to have these in consideration or forever only be applicable in niche environments.
Feels like DID is just keybase.com (pre coin-spam and zoom acquisition) or pgp.mit.edu wrapped in a pyramid scheme.
Summary: Relying on government ID isn't decentralized.
I'm having a hard time thinking of one such system though.
This article avoids the elephant in the room: nobody except cryptocurrency nuts asked for this.
The “Decentralised” part of DID should give a hint that this is yet another attempt to make crypto relevant to the real world outside of bypassing sanctions, paying for drugs, or extorting hacking victims.
Web 3.0 failed because cryptocurrencies can’t support the high bandwidth and low latency required. So the same people came up with DID, which can tolerate multi-hour transaction delays and storage capacities measured in single-digit kilobytes.
Most of the criticisms against Web 3.0 still apply to DID. It can be impossible to revoke, as the article stated. Which means if grandma’s wallet is hacked, she can be impersonated forever by the hacker, and not even the government can help her with this.
“Yay, censorship resistant!” many will proclaim. (Loudly)
Okay, name me one instance (1) where a citizen of a western country had their identity censored in any sense by their government.
> Okay, name me one instance (1) where a citizen of a western country had their identity censored in any sense by their government.
Eugene Shvidler‘s sanctioning by the UK poisoned his identity. A UK-US dual citizen living in Britain who had Russian business dealings.
The sanctions are devastating to personal freedom. Beyond the direct financial impact, they make it very difficult to travel, engage in charity or use digital goods.
You might argue he deserved it for making money in Russia, but the lack of due process is astounding.
His commercial behaviour predates any legal prohibition and he didn’t get to argue his case in front of a judge/jury before a punishment was installed.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jul/19/sanctions-regime...
Sanctions are an important component of our society, in the broadest sense. They are net good, not bad.
Sanctions are effective tools at undermining the economic & industrial base of an adversary.
They’re poor tools as substitutes for criminal penalties for local residents.
Less "adversary" as evaluated by a specific entity, more "bad actor" as evaluated by the collective. Which is the intent. Of course nobody issuing sanctions specifically intends them to be criminal penalties for local (target) residents, it's nonsensical anyway as the issuer(s) generally don't have any kind of criminal authority in the relevant jurisdictions.
Suffragettes, civil rights activists and Vietnam war protesters would’ve all been considered “bad actors” by their democratic governments at stages of their journey.
Yeah, but we course-corrected on those mistakes. That's how civil society works. We (necessarily) delegate trust and authority to higher-order abstract entities (i.e. the state) and make sure we have ways to influence how they behave (i.e. elections).
Eventually we course corrected, but illiberal government oppression of legitimate viewpoints delayed it. See the British government’s crackdowns on Trade Unions in the nineteenth century, for instance.
They're only a net good if you think the government of the biggest economy is always morally right. Because only sanctions by the biggest economies have any impact. Most of the people in the world who aren't Americans view America's foreign policy as overwhelmingly a net negative, so for most of the world those sanctions are a net bad.
[ citation needed ]
(waves hands around generally) everything?
Nowhere in the linked article does it say that his identity was censored or revoked by any government.
He's a dual-citizen and presumably has his identifying papers on hand.
To quote Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Shvidler#Sanctions
Painting a free billionaire oligarch living the high life abroad from Russia as a victim is not a very convincing example.Shvidler's sanctions take the form of a worldwide asset freeze, and transport sanctions; they do not affect his British citizenship.The challenge wasn’t precisely about revocation of citizenship, although you could take the example of Shamina Begum for that.
The problem with these rulings isn’t so much that no punishment is deserved, but that a government minister / civil service employee can declare somebody guilty. The only recourse is pursuing legal action to prove your own innocence.
You seem to be conflating two wildly unrelated concepts here.
This discourse is (very specifically!) about identity papers, not sanctions or any other form of government use and abuse of power.
The thread has drifted from government identity to censorship, then to sanctions and abuse of power.
It’s faithful to the original topic because strong government identity assists state actors who pursue those outcomes.
The crypto people are very concerned about what happens to them when they believe they will inevitably become an oligarch.
It's all a bit "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"
The crypto phase ended up accidentally showing us why centralized authority is important. It sounds great on paper: If we can simply enforce a protocol, then we don't need authority, right?
But we still have to trust who enforces the protocol. If we rely on trusts and exchanges to any degree, for example, to enable faster, more convenient transactions, or for user experience, then those trusts (banks) cannot be running off with the customer deposits like BitConnect and FTX did. The trust should be insured and should have to follow normal bank and currency exchange regulations. When you add in all the banking infrastructure that would be needed to bring cryptocurrencies up to speed we'd end up with a clunkier version of what we have (we already have fast digital banking, and cash is already anonymous and instant).
Regarding crypto for content chains: Basically the same ideas, if certain peers are trusted to host, serve, and/or broker content in some way, how do you trust those parties, or if there are content "vaults" off-chain to enable faster access to data, how do we know it wasn't tampered with off-chain? Can't store it on chain feasibly either, especially if the content is say full-length films.
I think blockchain for both cryptocurrencies and content chains is better suited for smaller peer networks where you know you can trust the node hosts and the cryptography is used more for keeping nodes in sync, and for lower-level security, not as a replacement for trust. Or if you don't trust the node hosts, then the trusted party is whoever maintains the "peer list" - but that's just a road toward what our Federal Reserve, or our Wikipedia, can already do much better with consumer banking and open-source contributions (respectively).
> Most of the criticisms against Web 3.0 still apply to DID. It can be impossible to revoke, as the article stated. Which means if grandma’s wallet is hacked, she can be impersonated forever by the hacker, and not even the government can help her with this.
VCs have credentialStatus, the id property of which is supposed to be a URI resolving to an RDF defined object dictating the status.
This means the issuer can just update the entity living behind that URI to revoke bad credentials.
If there's a central revocation list, then it's a centralised identity with a centralised authority.
That's the opposite if the "distributed" in DID, at least in the sense that the pro-Web-3.0 crypto fans are claiming.
Again, you're conflating DID with VC improperly.
VC is an extension built on top of DID. It's not decentralized Verifiable Credentials, it's just Verifiable Credentials.
The entire article is about VC, and refers to VC as DID (which is also what you're wrongly doing).
It's like criticizing the collective web standard based on REST. REST is not the web.
Also, the part that makes VC decentralized is the alternative (OIDC authorization code flow). VC doesn't require the issuer for verification. (So basically the user has control over attestation of information about their identity, not some third party)
That means even though the Gov issued you an ID they can't track every time you have your credentials verified.. it works exactly like a physical ID. It's issued by the government, but the government isn't there every time you need to show ID. Some might consider that an invasion of privacy if they were.
> Web 3.0 failed because cryptocurrencies can’t support the high bandwidth and low latency required.
Er, no.[1]
> Okay, name me one instance (1) where a citizen of a western country had their identity censored in any sense by their government.
I don't think this is the problem DID is trying to solve, but the article mentions illegal immigrants and stateless people.
Also, the entire witness protection program, whistleblower protection, certain government 'contractors'
Agreed this isn't the problem DID is trying to solve from what I can tell though.
As an aside, it's hard for me to read DID as anything other than disassociative identity disorder
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disord...
Why do people keep (deliberately?) confusing identity with authentication (and authorization)?
1) Identity is not supposed to be a secret, it is merely who you claim to be. It is no more secret than someone's name. Somewhat similar to the public key in a public key cryptosystem.
2) Authentication is the proving that who you claim to be is actually who you are. Many systems fail or don't even perform this step. Failure to do this causes wrong attribution of problems, it is why identity theft is not a failure of the victim but of the provider: a bank just took identity as if it was authentication and gave an unauthenticated user invalid access
3) Authorization: does the person who we've authenticated to be the person they claim to be actually have permissions to do what they're attempting to do. Not everyone with legitimate access to a system has the authorization to do everything. For example, maybe you can read a file, but not modify it.
I dont want my identity to be public. Its not like a public key at all.
My weight, height, eye color should only be as public as i make it. Thats all part of my identity.
Low quality post that doesn’t understand how DIDs work.
That's because it was clearly very heavily assisted by AI.
Ehm... Actually "problem 2" is not a problem but a feature, at social level, and unfortunately some states start to think allowing private companies to give identities (for driving license or ID cards or "just" digital identities) to citizens-users.
A democratic State is owned by their Citizens, formally at least, so only Citizens can identify other Citizens. Not really a monopoly but a safeguard not to be bannable by Google ID because some "terms violation" with no appeal.
For really decentralized systems the classic chain-of-trust model is more than enough IF people really invest in it.
Good article. I predict that in the future government ID shops (like mobile phone shops today) will be everywhere as people will constantly be losing their ID and keys and will keep needing to reverify their identity
Can’t we just go back to drawing a squiggle on a piece of paper where the verifying party kind of just eyeballs it and if it’s good enough (if they even looked at it in the first place), then it’s authenticated.
> Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the state, who forces government ID regulations onto businesses, employers, landlords and healthcare providers, will accept web-of-trust vouches or biometrics as “proof of identity”.
Having looked into it a little bit, web of trust (in the word of mouth / paper form) is already a legal proof of identity.
It was legalized again after WW2, and government ID made optional again rather than mandatory, because the people that forced mandatory IDs on everyone were literally the Nazis. (Related previous history : factory owners and workers.)
So looks like it's a matter of preservation of fundamental rights to insist on using web of trust rather than ID... and most specifically a question of everyday(ish) practice, so the question is how to best push back against the normalization of mandatory IDs ? (In which countries can you sue an administration / a business for refusing to work with you because you refused to provide them an ID ? Does it need to be escalated to civil disobedience and laws changed ? Other options ?)
Of note : this is perhaps only a step in the "Police State-ification" of our societies. At some point, you didn't have a fixed first name / surname / address. But then (for instance) Hausmann demolished your neighborhood, made one more legible to the state instead, and next time the (Paris Commune) riots happened, they failed. It also made you easier to tax, but also brought better sanitation and "foreign" firefighters and ambulance drivers could actually quickly find you. The question is : how much (by definition, unnatural) state legibility is too much, how little is too little, and how to maintain homeostasis in the right range ?