>Credit bureaus — as well as the various credit building products that are so common in these countries — are required to play that role. No they absolutely ar

>Credit bureaus — as well as the various credit building products that are so common in these countries — are required to play that role. No they absolutely are not. You know what institutions, after government, should have been in principle be absoultely ideally placed to help with identity in a private distributed way? BANKS (credit unions too perhaps). Lots of secure, physical locations people were used to going into. Already have a need to deal with serious physical security, and lots of money. Already tons of KYC infrastructure. Well regulated and trusted overall. Reasonable numbers of choices. Valuable in-house dogfooding opportunities. This should have been a slam-dunk service for banks themselves to do, and one near impossible to replicate the same way online which also would have been quite helpful for them vs online-only challengers. Each local branch could have a dedicated room or rooms to take photos and video, verify documentation, history, references, whatever else, all the stuff that was (and in much of the world still is) needed to prove ones' identity and open an account. Then the banks could all have their own CAs and give people a signed cert attesting that all this had been done in-person at XYZ location, every bank required to do it themselves with cross signing possible, and all online account usage required to use PKI, no password/email crap. And we'd live in a different, better world. Instead they've tried to outsource or externalize that. That should be absolutely on them. All the tech has been easily possible develop for something like 20 years (OpenSC even first release was 2001). I'd love to see a law along the lines that financial transactions and products including loans, credit cards etc that are only backed by stuff like described in this article (name, SS#, birthday etc) are simply unenforceable in court and that defendants can challenge it along the lines of anti-SLAPP statutes where the challenge happens pre-discovery and stops the whole process with attorney fees going to the defendant if they win. Bank tries to after somebody for unpaid debt and all they have are info like that? Case dismissed, they can just eat it. Criminal for credit collectors to go after it too. Bet we'd see some changes in a hurry then.