[drdaeman]

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]

> 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]

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]

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]

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.