KYC is in no way any kind of problem that needs to be fixed, it's a necessary and Actually Good feature of any sufficiently broad financial system. Avoiding KYC-type stuff may make sense in the small, but is actively harmful in the large.
But the article suggests that relying on government issued IDs as a base lets government track all that we do. That's not the case, and is the point with all these systems. It should be possible for instance, using cryptography, to make a distributed chat room service where it's public who has signed up for a chat room, but not who of the posters in it are who.
To be able to selectively prove your identity, including connection to the government-accountable you, without directly involving the government or even anything licensed by the government, would make us more free online, not less.
If you take "identity" to mean "the same thing", then you can certainly use a key-pair to show that two documents were signed by the same signing key. Of course, the owner could have lost control of their private key, but that could happen to government-issued ID as well.
If you want "identity" to mean "official persona", then there can only be one of those per person, which means government-issued. I think government ID should only be used for interacting with government; online purchases shouldn't rely on government ID.
Banking is awkward. To get a bank account, you usually have to produce government ID. But then the bank issues you with a bank-issued ID, which is effectively just a proxy for your government ID. It's weird because banks are not part of government, but they have quasi-governmental obligations, e.g. KYC. Even government departments do this; to sign up for self-assessment with HMRC, I have to prove I am who I say I am with government ID; but then HMRC issues me with an HMRC ID. That is nuts.
I want to be able to have multiple IDs that are not linked. I shouldn't have to give government ID to make an online purchase. And I shouldn't have to risk exposing my purchase history when I sign a post to an online forum. It's perfectly legal (here, at least) to have multiple real names; for example, I mainly go by my nickname, which doesn't appear on any official document. Online identity should mirror that.
But how will your benevolent rulers be able to socially gamify your behaviour and direct who gets to interact and mate with you? If social credit systems are to work, we need KYC and centralized ID.
I don't.
> If you want "identity" to mean "official persona"
Well, I want identity to mean me as a human being.
> I want to be able to have multiple IDs that are not linked.
Fine, but realize that statistically zero other people want this feature in, well, anything. No system which expects to serve more than a statistically zero percent slice of humanity can define identity in this way.
No, it's a trade-off. No KYC makes it possible for people to lose their identity, but it's also the only way to guarantee full privacy/anonymity, and to make it so the identify-provider doesn't have the power to de-platform anyone. Historically speaking, governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts due to forgetfulness etc.
Full privacy and anonymity are not virtues. They are actively bad. A system that is fully anonymous always becomes dominated by malicious users. De-platforming is a necessary capability of any system that expects to be used by a non-trivial segment of humanity.
> Historically speaking, governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts due to forgetfulness etc.
This isn't complicated. If I have an account with some money in it, and I lose my private key, then it cannot be the case that I lose access to that money. There must be some phone number I can call, or some person I can reach, which can restore my access to my money. This is a table-stakes property of any system that can ever expect to be used by more than a tiny niche of humanity.
"governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts"
People can not loose their accounts, because they are governed which makes silencing possible.
I disagree with this because it breaks the notion of innocent until proven guilty that is the cornerstone of a fair justice system. If the bank has any suspicions about where you get your bags of money that you deposit daily, they can inform the police and the police, without questioning you about where you get your money from, must prove that you are doing something illegal.
KYC and all other legislation of the same kind put the burden of proof on you to prove you're a good citizen. And this is wrong on so many levels.
KYC is about establishing identity, not establishing innocence or guilt or goodness or badness. You don't get to participate in society anonymously. That's a feature, not a bug.
Web of trust protocols are a decades-long solved problem (albeit without a prevailing deployment yet). It seems like your comment is meant to be quietly denigrating toward them (or do I have that wrong?). May I ask why?
It seems like eventually a web of trust model is going to arise and win over a critical mass.
Solved in a technical sense, maybe, but not in any meaningful sense. Statistically zero people use any web-of-trust based system for anything useful.
But we've already played this game, over the last couple of thousand years. That evolutionary process, however messy it may have been, has already produced a web of trust, to which we all delegate authority and responsibility. It's usually called "government".
The author seems unaware that DIDs are now removed from the latest specs from the OIDC Working Group and EU's eIDAS.
Is someone calling these "decentralized"? To me, decentralized ID is OIDC, which is "being developed" it's mostly not catching on at all, in favor of sadly centralized system like "login with [Google|Facebook]".
Is there some weird crypto-blockchain-something-something that I'm not aware of?
By contrast, a "centralized" digital ID phones home every time it presents and verifies. I don't know any standards, but most digital identities in China are of this form.
The CA is a single point of failure that can arbitrarily issue or fail to issue an identity certificate.
If you use lots of interchangeable CAs, then it “fails open”, in that any one CA can issue certificates for everyone. That’s still a single point of failure.
If you tie the ID to the Certificate Authority (e.g. gmail offers certs for gmail addresses), each person still is impacted by some single point of failure.
I’d say all these schemes are centralized.
I’d call the things you describe “offline identity verification”, though there is an additional nuance: the scheme could work offline, but still send a log of what happens when it reconnects. With that, the privacy properties are as bad as online schemes.
I have no idea what the bitcoin people mean by decentralized. It sounds like PKI with extra steps. shrug
Everybody else just looks at poorly-photographed jpeg and is like "yes, this dude is named like this". Even banks this days open accounts without ever touching sacred piece of plastic with human hands, let alone scanning it with crypto-mumbo-jumbo.
Why indeed.
There is an adventure novel "The Count of Monte Cristo" in which, as a small subplot, two ex-convicts are made to pose as Italian nobility in the Parisian upper society. Of course, nobody would believe such claims just on their own word for obvious reasons, which is why an "introduction to the society" was a custom. It still could be faked, of course, which is exactly what happened.
Also, why link it all to a single persistent physical identity? Because, no matter how many digital identities you use, you are still a single physical person, and it's actually noticeable.
The con tricks are as old as humanity, even if they take different forms in different eras, but the ground problem is the same: if someone approcaches you and claims to be e.g. an important noble named such and such from the overseas, they could very well be telling truth—or they could be lying, and there is almost no way to tell for certain, even though there are some good heuristics (their wealth is one, as you allude to).
This is literally how it works in majority of the real world; except for things where government has a role to play; most common case is taxes. If you are a landlord and collect rent from tenant and if either of you want to make tax related claims to the government, then you will have to provide/quote each other's government recognized identity in your tax returns.
For large parts of the population in the lower socio-economic strata, even this won't be relevant. And that reliance on that web-of-trust is the problem for them due to class discrimination etc. Hence, having a government issued identity (as a universal right) which acts as an anchor to which trusted attestations can be attached to is critical to make a difference in the life of the last person in that socio-economic line.
This is in essence the basis for India's identity system Aadhaar[1] – which is super minimal identity system – just biometrics (fingerprint, iris scan, head/shoulder photo, gender) – mapped to a a 12 digit number (basically a unique key in its database); plus 3 additional demographic fields – name, age (date of birth), address – which require external anchor proofs (which are very weak proofs). Here's the full list of accepted proofs - https://uidai.gov.in/images/commdoc/valid_documents_list.pdf
Cryptocurrency and friends really have no bearing on the problem. The known solutions are the same as they always were - web of trust, pki, tofu, pre-shared keys, or just give up and ignore the outside world. All have tradeoffs and are very far from satisfactory.
If you take a subpar solution and wrap it in 10 layers of cryptocurrency and magical thinking, you are just left with a complex version of the same subpar solution.
Within the Polykey network, each node can host vaults that safeguard sensitive information. By integrating identity verification directly into this decentralized framework, Polykey enables users to discover, trust, and securely share cryptographic keys with other verified nodes. This system departs from traditional methods that depend on anonymized wallet addresses for user discovery, offering instead a mechanism for direct interaction within users’ operational environments, provided their identities have been linked to their nodes.
This approach aims to tackle foundational challenges in key management and identity binding. Do you think integrating identity verification in this way could improve the management and security of cryptographic identities? Are there any potential advantages or drawbacks you foresee with this model?
If it works for your usecase, great. But lets not pretend its any different from the things we were doing in the 90s.
If you’ve got a peer-to-peer network of information nodes, where each person is able to assert information about themselves in their node, but the whole trust is based on the polykey binding at setup, I see 3 key challenges:
1) Where’s the real world verification of any identity attributes stored in the node? 2) How do we detect when/if the root key has been compromised, allowing arbitrary new vaults and identity attributes to be automatically trusted within the network?
3) How does this meaningfully improve the experience over having a CA sign a certificate that contains attributes about you? (sibling poster’s argument).
> If decentralized ID is just an extension of the existing government ID system, it provides neither privacy nor financial inclusion.
VC is a spec built on top of DID, in no way shape or form is VC required for DID.
This statement alone shows the author doesn't understand (or is intentionally misrepresenting) the relationship between DID and VC (which is kind of crucial to write an entire blog post on either topic)
> And just like the existing system, it continues to exclude millions of people who can’t get government ID
VC is a technology for convenience, not solving social problems. It's basically just to enable technologies like Tap to Pay but for your Gov IDs.
E.g. rather than having to carry your drivers license you just carry your phone. It's almost as if the article misses the entire purpose for which VC is designed (but then again, what can one expect when they're criticizing DIDs yet -actually- talking about VC throughout the entire post)
As others have mentioned, the US Federal government issues passports and passport cards, yet it's entirely up to the agency that wants ID what IDs they will accept. I've been turned down for using a passport card for some Washington State government activities ("the card doesn't have a signature"), using a passport to buy an age-restricted item from a store ("we can't scan it"), and a passport card with the state's largest credit union ("too much fraud with passport cards").
Yet none of these are documented anywhere. Everyone just assumes you'll have a state-issued driver license and if you don't, well, you're obviously up to something nefarious. (Before anyone asks, I do have a state-issued enhanced identification card. It looks identical to a driver license, except it says "identification" on it. I've still been told "that's not a driver's license, I can't take that.")
It doesn't help that some clerks are confused by the zoo of government issued IDs that exist in the US. IDs in the US are a mess, the legal barriers to making it possible to have an organized identity system are very high, and both the Democrats and Republicans are resistant to removing those legal barriers, so this situation is unlikely to change.
This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it.
The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.”
Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers.
How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this? If you have an ID card issued by e.g. your brokerage, it can use strong cryptography and be no easier to forge than any government ID. If you lost your card you could use any mechanism you could use in the event that you lose your government ID. Some of these methods have poor security properties but that's the same in both cases.
The only thing you get from centralization is non-consensual tracking.
This is similar to how the U.S. has a certain amount of opposition from Christian sects who believe any sort of national ID number would be the biblical mark of the beast. There’s a certain dark humor in the way privacy is used to complain about identification cards but that only leads to the semi-regulated private data brokers being used by everyone, including the government, with purchased access to far more data.
Isn’t the CCP’s behaviour still one of the best arguments against universal government ID?
The logic is actually "That which I wish to control or destroy, I must first enumerate/name."
A Government that exists only to administer (and not control the populace), has no need to know who all it's citizen's are. Merely to know who is involved in the limited processes being administered.
Sadly, all common sense around that seems to have evaporated since 2001 in the U.S. It seems like only those of us left who experienced the pre-9/11 world are doing a terrible job at instilling a picture of a government that's not all "Big Brother is watching" in the younger generations. The gluttony of Law Enforcement and the IC for a Single Identification Number to unify and enumerate every flesh and blood person wandering around cannot be overstated.
In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka "green card" holders) can't get passports. They can get state-level drivers licenses but only citizens can get passports from the centralized-level Federal government.
Who gets to choose the they?
Your government needs to know who everybody is. That means illegal immigrants can't get drivers licenses, and that's kind of the point.
> Even IDs for undocumented people (such as Californian AB 60 driver’s licenses) require a foreign passport, national ID card or birth certificate, and can’t help people who have no state-issued identity documents at all.
> This existing ID system is harmful, inaccessible and a single point of failure
The post reads a little bit overblown.
Seems to me, the whole reason ID cards have photos on is because they get lost/stolen/borrowed all the time.
Even if the government had the inclination to run a big national IT project so I could use zero knowledge proofs to verify my age for pornhub by scanning my driving license NFC chip, they'd still end up needing a webcam face check to make sure I wasn't some kid using dad's driving license. At which point the privacy angle becomes a joke anyway.
I will go down screaming, fighting, kicking, biting, and faxing my tax returns to the IRS, really doing everything lawful in my power to drag the whole system to a halt if digital ID gets forced on me. I don't care if I have to write a script that's going to trade bitcoin 800 times a second on 12 different exchanges, I don't care if I have to make my tax return 200,000 pages long and deliberately reorder the stack so that every single sheet is out of order, and it's all in a font that was deliberately chosen to be incompatible with OCR systems. If the US government will let me submit my tax returns in Farsi, Urdu, or Esperanto, or some other obscure language that the IRS would need to hire someone to translate, I will, just to add all of the absolute maximum pain, inefficiency, and suffering into this process.
Keep pushing this shit on people who don't want it. Malicious compliance is like reflected DDoS attacks with huge asymmetric I/O sizes: I alone can easily force the government to waste 10,000+ hours of effort for each hour I put in, and what's more, I can and will write tutorials, open source all of this, and advertise it everywhere if digital ID does get forced on society.
Problem with this? Stop pushing digital ID or start pushing to let me renounce my American citizenship without posessing another citizenship.
The idea of a completely anonymous citizen that can bank, buy, and talk with others with full control of what other people know about them is pretty much a modern invention and is slowly disappearing again and society adapts to a technological world.
That is a change in the structure, the unwritten expectations of society, that I agree we should resist that change.
The previously unwritten expectations should be codified into rules that should be followed.
Anyway, a good analogy is photo radar. Speed limits are set knowing everybody speeds. We could now easily enforce them everywhere. But if we do, we need to raise them to an appropriate level, not the "we know you're breaking them" level. Same with what you're saying about privacy, as the cost of invading it goes down, we need different controls, we can't just be cool with it because it was always hypothetically possible to hire a private investigator to stalk someone.
The bitter pill to swallow is society needs to learn to tolerate some amount of crime in order to maintain their freedom. They want the government to be all powerful so that it can stop crime before it even happens. They don't want the responsibility for themselves. The responsibility that freedom requires, the responsibility to personally defend themselves when the bad guys come knocking. No, they want to delegate it all to some authorities. They better hope they don't end up as serfs in somebody's fiefdom.
I would go a step further and say that society needs some level of crime in order to gain freedoms, not just keep the ones they have. As a thought experiment, imagine you had a machine that would magically prevent anyone who would violate the law from doing so from the moment its activated for the rest of time. Is there any point in all of history that you think would be a good time to activate that machine? Certainly you would want to avoid activating it any time that slavery was legal. Probably be a good idea to skip the world wars era. Civil rights era would be another good time to avoid. The Troubles wouldn't be a great time either I wouldn't think. And if you believe in the benefits of medical usage of various schedule I drugs, I wouldn't recommend turning it on today either.
Sure, a reduction in crime might be a great thing for society, and there's no telling how many lives would be improved if truly bad people were prevented from doing their crimes. But the flip side of that is I can't think of a single point in history where some group or action was criminalized that later turned out to be something that should not have been so. And I don't have faith that we'd make nearly as much progress on things without people willing to break the law and bring those injustices to our attention.
I invite you to live in Haiti for a little while and then come back and let us know how that went for you.
If you have them "backed" with governmentally issued ID's, they allow the government ID monopoly to continue (with all its claimed faults). If they are instead completely separate they will not be considered "valid" in most situations where ID's are required.
Then the author warn against the whole idea of having one, single, strong identifier connected to your person at all, and urges for the option of creating multiple identities.
In almost all circumstances where identification is required, the whole point of requiring ID falls apart of you can create a new one whenever you want. We can of course argue that the whole surveillance society is wrong. KYC requirements, no fly lists, credit scores etc, but any proposed system need to have these in consideration or forever only be applicable in niche environments.
Feels like DID is just keybase.com (pre coin-spam and zoom acquisition) or pgp.mit.edu wrapped in a pyramid scheme.
I'm having a hard time thinking of one such system though.
The “Decentralised” part of DID should give a hint that this is yet another attempt to make crypto relevant to the real world outside of bypassing sanctions, paying for drugs, or extorting hacking victims.
Web 3.0 failed because cryptocurrencies can’t support the high bandwidth and low latency required. So the same people came up with DID, which can tolerate multi-hour transaction delays and storage capacities measured in single-digit kilobytes.
Most of the criticisms against Web 3.0 still apply to DID. It can be impossible to revoke, as the article stated. Which means if grandma’s wallet is hacked, she can be impersonated forever by the hacker, and not even the government can help her with this.
“Yay, censorship resistant!” many will proclaim. (Loudly)
Okay, name me one instance (1) where a citizen of a western country had their identity censored in any sense by their government.
Eugene Shvidler‘s sanctioning by the UK poisoned his identity. A UK-US dual citizen living in Britain who had Russian business dealings.
The sanctions are devastating to personal freedom. Beyond the direct financial impact, they make it very difficult to travel, engage in charity or use digital goods.
You might argue he deserved it for making money in Russia, but the lack of due process is astounding.
His commercial behaviour predates any legal prohibition and he didn’t get to argue his case in front of a judge/jury before a punishment was installed.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jul/19/sanctions-regime...
He's a dual-citizen and presumably has his identifying papers on hand.
To quote Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Shvidler#Sanctions
Shvidler's sanctions take the form of a worldwide asset freeze,
and transport sanctions; they do not affect his British citizenship.
But we still have to trust who enforces the protocol. If we rely on trusts and exchanges to any degree, for example, to enable faster, more convenient transactions, or for user experience, then those trusts (banks) cannot be running off with the customer deposits like BitConnect and FTX did. The trust should be insured and should have to follow normal bank and currency exchange regulations. When you add in all the banking infrastructure that would be needed to bring cryptocurrencies up to speed we'd end up with a clunkier version of what we have (we already have fast digital banking, and cash is already anonymous and instant).
Regarding crypto for content chains: Basically the same ideas, if certain peers are trusted to host, serve, and/or broker content in some way, how do you trust those parties, or if there are content "vaults" off-chain to enable faster access to data, how do we know it wasn't tampered with off-chain? Can't store it on chain feasibly either, especially if the content is say full-length films.
I think blockchain for both cryptocurrencies and content chains is better suited for smaller peer networks where you know you can trust the node hosts and the cryptography is used more for keeping nodes in sync, and for lower-level security, not as a replacement for trust. Or if you don't trust the node hosts, then the trusted party is whoever maintains the "peer list" - but that's just a road toward what our Federal Reserve, or our Wikipedia, can already do much better with consumer banking and open-source contributions (respectively).
VCs have credentialStatus, the id property of which is supposed to be a URI resolving to an RDF defined object dictating the status.
This means the issuer can just update the entity living behind that URI to revoke bad credentials.
That's the opposite if the "distributed" in DID, at least in the sense that the pro-Web-3.0 crypto fans are claiming.
Er, no.[1]
I don't think this is the problem DID is trying to solve, but the article mentions illegal immigrants and stateless people.
Agreed this isn't the problem DID is trying to solve from what I can tell though.
As an aside, it's hard for me to read DID as anything other than disassociative identity disorder
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disord...
1) Identity is not supposed to be a secret, it is merely who you claim to be. It is no more secret than someone's name. Somewhat similar to the public key in a public key cryptosystem.
2) Authentication is the proving that who you claim to be is actually who you are. Many systems fail or don't even perform this step. Failure to do this causes wrong attribution of problems, it is why identity theft is not a failure of the victim but of the provider: a bank just took identity as if it was authentication and gave an unauthenticated user invalid access
3) Authorization: does the person who we've authenticated to be the person they claim to be actually have permissions to do what they're attempting to do. Not everyone with legitimate access to a system has the authorization to do everything. For example, maybe you can read a file, but not modify it.
My weight, height, eye color should only be as public as i make it. Thats all part of my identity.
A democratic State is owned by their Citizens, formally at least, so only Citizens can identify other Citizens. Not really a monopoly but a safeguard not to be bannable by Google ID because some "terms violation" with no appeal.
For really decentralized systems the classic chain-of-trust model is more than enough IF people really invest in it.
Having looked into it a little bit, web of trust (in the word of mouth / paper form) is already a legal proof of identity.
It was legalized again after WW2, and government ID made optional again rather than mandatory, because the people that forced mandatory IDs on everyone were literally the Nazis. (Related previous history : factory owners and workers.)
So looks like it's a matter of preservation of fundamental rights to insist on using web of trust rather than ID... and most specifically a question of everyday(ish) practice, so the question is how to best push back against the normalization of mandatory IDs ? (In which countries can you sue an administration / a business for refusing to work with you because you refused to provide them an ID ? Does it need to be escalated to civil disobedience and laws changed ? Other options ?)
Of note : this is perhaps only a step in the "Police State-ification" of our societies. At some point, you didn't have a fixed first name / surname / address. But then (for instance) Hausmann demolished your neighborhood, made one more legible to the state instead, and next time the (Paris Commune) riots happened, they failed. It also made you easier to tax, but also brought better sanitation and "foreign" firefighters and ambulance drivers could actually quickly find you. The question is : how much (by definition, unnatural) state legibility is too much, how little is too little, and how to maintain homeostasis in the right range ?