2 ms·
Oh god no. That's dangerous and unnecessary. When you get down to it, what's our real minimum requirement for curbing scams and spams? We do not need to know
by Terr_ 2y ago
Oh god no. That's dangerous and unnecessary.
When you get down to it, what's our real minimum requirement for curbing scams and spams?
We do not need to know someone's legal identity, in fact we don't even need to know if they're a person rather than a person-with-a-program, we just need to know that they have a person-sized footprint of "skin in the game", as opposed to sockpuppets in a botnet.
- Terr_ 2y agoTo spitball an annoying but way-less-Orwellian response... Imagine your local City Hall has a physical vending-machine. This machine allows you to pay $2 to a charity of your choice in exchange for a kind of special anonymous token that can be used to prove that the $2 donation happened. Then when you sign up to a site like HN, the administrator has a policy: "New accounts must supply proof from the last year which hasn't already been used on this site before." There's a lot of technical detail we could go into about how to maximize user privacy (so that you can't be tracked across sites) and prevent a site from "stealing" and reusing things that were shared with it... but the key point is that 99% of sites do not need identity-information to accomplish their moderation goals or personalized block-lists. Such a system could actually be cheaper and more equitable than one based on permanent government IDs.