> The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire

This is not true. Government agencies generally look up your ID as necessary to check if it's still valid.

Stopped for speeding? The cop is going to look up your driver's license.

Leaving the country? They're running your passport number.

Starting a job? They're checking the status of your SSN.

The physical ID is good enough for low-stakes stuff like renting a car with a driver's license, or proving your age to get into a bar. But it's already not trusted on its own for any of the serious stuff you're talking about, like where you can reside and work.

Not just that, but currently, requiring real data to register to eg. social networks (reddit, hn,...) is hard. With everyone having a digital ID on their phones, tying their identity to their real ID will be easy, you'll just "sign" (or whatever) your reddit registration with your ID and your real name will be tied to that account. Combine this with EU chat control (and UK alternatives.. and well, EU digital ID alternatives), and the era of semi-anonymous internet use is over.

No the proposal is in line with your first paragraph. 'Attribute level proofs' (cyptographically signed data) stored in the user wallet, with those signatures coming from verification companies polling an API in front of government departments. The other side of it is a trust registry holding verification service public keys for signature checks..

I'm against the ID, but the more good faith reason for a database entry is it should eliminate fake IDs.

> The UK's proposal makes the "digital ID" a pointer to an entry in a centralized database.

Very similar to the "EU settlement scheme" which would gave EU citizens which had work and settled in the UK pre-Brexit after a very lengthy and non-deterministic application process the right to stay without any paper document to prove that they actually got that right. Just a database entry on a government computer. Too bad if an extreme right-wing goverment came to power and something happened to that database.

>When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary.

Penury and deportation are quite a bit of scope already! Maybe they'll put an "arrest" bit in there. Warrants are already a thing. I don't see the UK going in for murder just yet. What's left?

Hey we can make a new style of cooperative VPN: everyone shuffles all their traffic and uses each others IDs randomly so the data makes less sense

>The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire. Distributed storage in action.

Not really. It's part of identity management or whatever it's called to have an ability to recall ids, because they get lost, stolen and people to who they are issued die.

>When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary.

What are the scary implication really? Most of the EU and beyond has some kind of login to the government capability. And?

What's the threat model really? The government will revoke your fancy thing to report taxes digitally for no reason and bankrupt you? They can do so without such roundabout ways.

SSL has Certificate Revokation List, this could be implemented for Digital ID as well.

In fact, if British Digital ID is based on PKI, then CRL will come out of the box

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_revocation_list