4 ms·

Identity is "infrastructure" government should provide via something like mDLS. A lot of work needs to go into make sure it is secure and it can be used in a wa

Identity is "infrastructure" government should provide via something like mDLS. A lot of work needs to go into make sure it is secure and it can be used in a way that protects privacy. Eg selective disclosure of attributes for verifying age. Pairwise pseudonyms for identity when your online identity doesn't need to be tied to you real identity, which is most of the time. Something like that would go far in dealing with sybil issues in decentralized systems, which is often the source of a lot of headaches for system designers.

drdaeman 8mo ago
Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity. They (like any other entity) can attest, but such attestation should hold as few of any special value as possible.
- davidgay 8mo ago
  > Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity. An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc [0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church
  - drdaeman 8mo ago
    Is that really so? They maintained census, but for government functions (like accounting and taxes), and actual identity communication almost never involved government. Passports use for anything except international travel is a very modern thing as well. For most of the history the source of identify was individual themselves (as it should be), that is, one told their name and origin and others accepted that, unless someone knew otherwise.
- Seattle3503 8mo ago
  We've seen ~20 years of people trying to solve identity without the government. We've seen plenty of solutions that can provide stable identities over time, but we haven't really seen anything that provides meaningful sybil resistance. As computer systems become more and more "autonomous", sybil resistance is increasingly the most important feature of any identity system. Any identity system that doesn't solve that problem pushes to the application layer, where it usually has UX impacts that have serious tradeoffs with adoption.
  - drdaeman 8mo ago
    I understand this. I also understand that if history teaches us anything it’s that any centralized governance (of any nature, not just traditional national and regional governments, but any centrally organized communities, like corporations) is to be constantly distrusted and kept in check, and even then it’s dangerous to let it take over social functions. That’s why I wrote “only as a last resort”, that is, unless and until someone thinks of something better. (And then switching over is another issue… that may need some pre-planning even better new solution exists.) Or maybe someday we’ll have some interesting revelations about personal identity and sybil resistance won’t be necessary. But that’ll probably be only some centuries later.
    - Seattle3503 8mo ago
      To be clear, all we need from the government is to establish a person really exists and verify basic properties. We don't need more than that, so we can and should use all cryptography at our disposal (and invent more) to prevent any more information disclosure to both services and government. I get that identity is a sort of last holdout for the tech libertarians of old. But after years working in KYC, what I saw was the accumulation of vast amounts of sensitive information held by private actors in a way that was completely democratically unaccountable and couldn't be corrected by the average citizen. It's time to bring identity out of the shadows and make it ours to control.
      - drdaeman 8mo ago

drdaeman 8mo ago

Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity. They (like any other entity) can attest, but such attestation should hold as few of any special value as possible.

davidgay 8mo ago
> Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity. An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc [0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church
- drdaeman 8mo ago
  Is that really so? They maintained census, but for government functions (like accounting and taxes), and actual identity communication almost never involved government. Passports use for anything except international travel is a very modern thing as well. For most of the history the source of identify was individual themselves (as it should be), that is, one told their name and origin and others accepted that, unless someone knew otherwise.
Seattle3503 8mo ago
We've seen ~20 years of people trying to solve identity without the government. We've seen plenty of solutions that can provide stable identities over time, but we haven't really seen anything that provides meaningful sybil resistance. As computer systems become more and more "autonomous", sybil resistance is increasingly the most important feature of any identity system. Any identity system that doesn't solve that problem pushes to the application layer, where it usually has UX impacts that have serious tradeoffs with adoption.
- drdaeman 8mo ago
  I understand this. I also understand that if history teaches us anything it’s that any centralized governance (of any nature, not just traditional national and regional governments, but any centrally organized communities, like corporations) is to be constantly distrusted and kept in check, and even then it’s dangerous to let it take over social functions. That’s why I wrote “only as a last resort”, that is, unless and until someone thinks of something better. (And then switching over is another issue… that may need some pre-planning even better new solution exists.) Or maybe someday we’ll have some interesting revelations about personal identity and sybil resistance won’t be necessary. But that’ll probably be only some centuries later.
  - Seattle3503 8mo ago
    To be clear, all we need from the government is to establish a person really exists and verify basic properties. We don't need more than that, so we can and should use all cryptography at our disposal (and invent more) to prevent any more information disclosure to both services and government. I get that identity is a sort of last holdout for the tech libertarians of old. But after years working in KYC, what I saw was the accumulation of vast amounts of sensitive information held by private actors in a way that was completely democratically unaccountable and couldn't be corrected by the average citizen. It's time to bring identity out of the shadows and make it ours to control.
    - drdaeman 8mo ago