I am kind of shocked and glad to see someone has already built this -- for the last few years I have been thinking on and off about an electronic ID based crypt

I am kind of shocked and glad to see someone has already built this -- for the last few years I have been thinking on and off about an electronic ID based crypto currency UBI. I see the biggest challenges to the succes of such a project in: - hardware difficulties: many android phones do not support the extended APDU commands necessary to use the digital signing application of the chip on the passport. If UBIC is not immediately usable on almost every phone, it may not find wide adoption. And an UBI like this only gains value through adoption. - government restriction of passport use: afaik, the German ID card can only be used to digitally sign data from sanctioned sources, i. e. your service that uses the ID card to sign data must first authorize itself to the ID card using a valid certificate issued by a government certificate authority. - government sabotage: while flooding the system with fake passport certificates might mean bad PR, the government ultimately controls all the trust anchors and will do this if UBIC gets dangerous. It's good to have different UBICs per country, this way the power of a single government is limited. - privacy: since reliable passport revocation is not available, proof of passport is not enough to prevent multiple passport use. I think, aside from schemes where people meet in person and check each other's passports, only a non-anonymous proof of identity system will work.