To 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 c

To 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.