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by mrhappyunhappy 2845 days ago
All the more reason to move to block chain identities.
2 comments

Fuck the blockchain.

Just issue public/private keys to citizens. They sign with their private key, banks verify with their public key. Anyone can request your public key from the Social Security Administration via API. Done.

The SSN acting both as the identifier and the password is the real problem, and throwing the blockchain into the mix just complicates things more.

We still need a central agency. It's the authentication method that is pathetically worthless.

Terrible idea. If you try to force users to do key management, you've lost.

Keybase is the only one getting this right, and people are now claiming they're ignoring security in order to do it. It would be a dumpster fire to trust government agencies to get the design requirements right.

Really? It seems to be working fantastically in Estonia:

https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/id-card/

That’s very cool! Thank you for pointing out the counterexample.
Belgium also uses decent crypto, software, and hardware for their electronic identity system:

https://eid.belgium.be/en/what-eid

For the last several decades, many of us Americans have become too skeptical about what government can do in terms of technology, even while it's completely true that government often gets it wrong.

That skepticism may have something to do with many of us Americans watching our government spectacularly fail to keep pace with changing technology over the past few decades. Not sure there's any real solution for a nation of federated states who don't like to coordinate with one another. Please prove me wrong, politicians.
Users are already doing key management! It's just that the record ID, public key, and private key are all the same number.
Let's all move to a system where, once someone has taken a fraudulent loan in your name, it gets put on a permant record that can't ever be changed or undone, what a great idea!

You'd think that crypto proponents would have learned after the first five major bitcoin breaches and millions of dollars of losses without recourse, that having trusted people with the power to change transaction history is a good thing.