There is the Notary Public service for physical documents. I did a quick search a while ago out of curiosity, and there appears to be an eNotary service that u

There is the Notary Public service for physical documents. I did a quick search a while ago out of curiosity, and there appears to be an eNotary service that uses X509 certs to notarize a digital document. I've never seen this used "in the wild", but if it is rooted in the traditional Notarization services, and is based on open standards, why wouldn't tech companies utilize this as a last resort identity service? Something else I thought about is if someone could come up with a CA service that specializes in personal / client side certs. They could then indicate what fields they have verified (name, address, etc). Also an option to indicate if they have that information on file but not disclosed. And if someone wants a truly anonymous cert, have variable pricing for those. The cert would tell how much someone paid for it. That way services such as message boards could allow anonymous users but set a nominal threshold for certificate cost that they would accept -- high enough that it would limit duplicate spam accounts, but low enough that it would not be much of a burden for a typical user.