Maybe this will come off as cynical, but aren't the customers of these 3 companies doing what you suggest here? "Putting their money where their mouth is", and since they have a lot of money their voice gets heard over the ones of individuals with no money. I don't think it's your goal.
So your second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly used (by fiat or even voluntarily), you give a tremendous amount of power to the issuer/manager of it, as they basically hold the power of also removing/altering your public identity at their whims. You also make it harder and harder to remain anonymous and preserve your privacy, two things that might seem useless in a functional democracy, but unfortunately democracies are not perfect and they can turn into totalitarian systems where the wet dream of dictators is exactly this: having total control over every individual, especially the ones who would dare signing petitions against them.
This is by far not something humans have solved systemically, we have the technical solutions to build such systems, and governments tend to push to implement them, but as someone who cares about privacy/censorship resistance I do my best to build alternative, opt-in, systems to go around them.
> our second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly used (by fiat or even voluntarily), you give a tremendous amount of power to the issuer/manager of it, as they basically hold the power of also removing/altering your public identity at their whims.
A decentralized way to issue and authenticate private keys, so as to eliminate the trust requirement- not just transferring it to a certificate issuer- seems needful.
Not only could it help eliminate the manufacture of consensus in OP, such a technology would have broad implications for trust and might lend itself to anti-counterfeiting measures.
Although such a development would also amount to solving the problem of Byzantine consensus so I would feel most fortunate to see it happen in my lifetime.
No. Public/private keys can be under the control of the individual. You only need the public key to be signed by a trusted 3rd party. That only gives them the power to revoke it, but even the revoking can't cancel what you already signed while the key was valid.
Sorry, but public-private key pair sais nothing about birth or death of individual. Which is an occurrence as common as you would guess. Being living person in some country is the relevant information, holding some cryptographic keys is not.
There's value to considering possible points of failure up front.
Think of the inertia that mag stripe only payment cards have in the USA, and think about how long it's taken to get chip cards rolled out. And then consider that we don't have the more secure chip and pin variant that Europe has, and (to the best of my knowledge) don't have any plans to go that route in the future.
A bad solution with broad penetration and huge network effects is one that can't easily be changed in the future. Let's do imagine some worst case scenarios and think about what it would involve to harden a system against them before rolling it out to everyone.
Anonymity, in the age of cryptography, is not going anywhere.
Between astroturfing, AIs, trolls, and foreign involvement, we are increasingly in need of a countering force. We are currently suffering under the tyranny of the anonymous!
It is astonishing that so many people are still swayed by such outdated cyberpunk ideologies! The arguments of the 1990s do not make sense given the realities of the 2020s.
> we are increasingly in need of a countering force. We are currently suffering under the tyranny of the anonymous!
Are you? What happens if this "need" isn't filled? Just because you can't probe popular opinion with an open comment system, it doesn't mean it is a requirement for society to work. We have systems to vote that work and don't have these issues. Simple paper ballots work really well.
> It is astonishing that so many people are still swayed by such outdated cyberpunk ideologies
Private companies and governments have never collected as much data as they do now, mostly without real consent, and they are getting the means to exploit this data very efficiently now with AI. The cypherpunk ideology (cyberpunk is a fictional sci-fi genre, although it's kinda related with its themes) applies more than ever in this context, it actually predicted the situation we are living, so I can't agree with you when you claim it is "outdated". Individuals should value their ability to be anonymous if they intend to remain somewhat free, this is the "counter" to mass surveillance.
What happens if this need isn’t filled? Well, the focus of this article for one, more and more astroturfing and fraud. How about riling up another country’s voting public with lies? Various forms of harassment and bullying? And do you think AIs are going to make this better or worse? Should we ignore all of this because we’re worried about the outcome matching the plot of a Gibson or Stephenson story?
I can’t come up with a better argument than I’ve made in these two articles:
Don't you think that security-guaranteed-by-strong-goverment model is outdated too? Governments all around the world seem to be incompetent to solve the emerging issues.
So your second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly used (by fiat or even voluntarily), you give a tremendous amount of power to the issuer/manager of it, as they basically hold the power of also removing/altering your public identity at their whims. You also make it harder and harder to remain anonymous and preserve your privacy, two things that might seem useless in a functional democracy, but unfortunately democracies are not perfect and they can turn into totalitarian systems where the wet dream of dictators is exactly this: having total control over every individual, especially the ones who would dare signing petitions against them.
This is by far not something humans have solved systemically, we have the technical solutions to build such systems, and governments tend to push to implement them, but as someone who cares about privacy/censorship resistance I do my best to build alternative, opt-in, systems to go around them.