Comment by overfeed
3 days ago
Besides making yourself party to a criminal conspiracy, I suspect it would be partly the same reason you won't sell/rent your real-world identity to other people today; an illegal immigrant may be willing to rent it from you right now.
Mostly, it will because online identifies will be a market for lemons: there will be so many fake/expired/revoked identities being sold that the value of each one will be worth pennies, and that's not commensurate with the risk of someone commiting crimes and linking it to your government-registered identity.
> the same reason you won't sell/rent your real-world identity to other people today
If you sell your real-world identity to other people today, and they get arrested, then the police will know your identity (obviously). How does that work with a privacy-preserving scheme? If you sell your anonymous token that says that you are a human to a machine and the machine gets arrested, then the police won't be able to know who you are, right? That was the whole point of the privacy-preserving token.
I'm genuinely interested, I don't understand how it can work technically and be privacy-preserving.
It would appear most of the people commenting on the subject don't even understand it.
With privacy preserving cryptography the tokens are standalone and have no ties to the identity that spawned them.
No enforcement for abuse is possible.
> With privacy preserving cryptography the tokens are standalone and have no ties to the identity that spawned them.
I suspect there will be different levels of attestations from the anonymous ("this is an adult"), to semi-anonymous ("this person was born in 20YY and resides in administrative region XYZ") to the compete record ("This is John Quincy Smith III born on YYYY-MM-DD with ID doc number ABC123"). Somewhere in between the extremes is an pseudonymous token that's strongly tied to a single identity with non-repudiation.
Anonymous identities that can be easily churned out on demand by end-users have zero antibot utility
2 replies →
Right, that's my feeling as well
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> Mostly, it will because online identifies will be a market for lemons: there will be so many fake/expired/revoked identities being sold that the value of each one will be worth pennies, and that's not commensurate with the risk of someone commiting crimes and linking it to your government-registered identity. That would be trivially solved by using same verification mechanisms they would be used with.