Korea has something like this too. Any citizen can pay a small fee to get a digital verification cert, which contains a private-public key pair and a digital au

Korea has something like this too. Any citizen can pay a small fee to get a digital verification cert, which contains a private-public key pair and a digital authentication signature from a trusted authority, who has been vetted by a nationwide system. Alternatively, one can sign up for a bank account and get a cert for free. This is used to login to online banking stuff, government business (taxes etc) and online activity. Fun thing is that the trust tree terminates at the government or via a trust web made by the banks. The reason for this is that when they were making the system, the academics and government officials had a bit of a disagreement and made two systems. Korean crypto is pretty crazy. Read about XEED and the decade long battle with MS ActiveX.