[fnord77]

all this nonsense would go away if we had some sort of universal identification system on the internet.

people act like anonymity is some kind of right, but it really wasn't in the past. You needed to prove who you are to get a loan, drivers license, etc.

[gyam]

Anonymity is the default, we don’t walk around with our names and all our interests and thoughts attached to a label to be read by anyone. If anything, internet made it go away. Eg. even if you knew a person’s name you wouldn’t be able to look up other information about them before, now you can. Previously, you’d be able to go to a store and buy a thing without giving any information, now you have to give the “email” that collects most information about you. Your examples of loan, licence etc are not like 99% of interactions, and those can be handled as special cases like before.

[visualradio]

> Previously, you’d be able to go to a store and buy a thing without giving any information

We can still do that, it's called paying with cash. Paper money is the people's money.

> Your examples of loan, licence etc are not like 99% of interactions, and those can be handled as special cases like before

With regards to loans, it is possible for state governments to establish regional public land loan offices to issue equity loans in reference to the production and replacement cost of existent tangible personal property fixed or held on site without monitoring all of the purchases of movable personal property by the borrower to determine credit-worthiness. The borrower just has to prove there is some tangible artifact of personal property which exists, which the loan office can auction if the debt goes bad or write off if the artifact is destroyed.

We just have to mandate the loan offices don't do something stupid, like issue loans against the excess value of real estate attributable land scarcity and resell mortgages to private investors which will resell derivatives, to avoid generating a real estate bubble and the accumulation of $100+ trillion in derivatives. Additionally we'd probably need to replace many regressive taxes with distributive land taxes to ensure that households and cooperatives had cheaper access to land in order to obtain a deed or long term lease granting the security for spatially fixed personal property necessary to qualify for such loans.

[fnord77]

for most of human history, people knew the names and interests of people around them

anonymity is a recent thing

[sidewndr46]

I don't know where you live, but at least in North America the requirements for a loan are laughably low. I once was interested in getting a vehicle loan on a new vehicle purchase. I gave the financial guy all my information and he showed me the terms. I agreed to them and bought the vehicle.

I have no idea how, but he issued me a loan on that vehicle using incorrect information for basically everything except my address. Name, birthday, etc. did not match. Somehow the system had a completely different set of records. When I called the lender about it, they didn't even seem surprised. Just took a phone call to get everything corrected and a new set of paperwork mailed out to me.

[the_other]

It is and should be a right for a lot of things.

I imagine few people doubt the practicality of trust in a transaction or application as you mention.

But we should be able to sit in a cafe and discuss our plans for cultural subversion and last night's sports event without the *till* shopping us out to the thought police.

[wolverine876]

Can you see downsides to that? How do you address it?

I think it's not that anonymity is a right, it's that other rights are strongly impacted by the lack of anonymity.

[someguyorother]

Just make it zero-knowledge. You use the ID server to prove that you're not a sock puppet of someone already registered, but that's all the site needs to know.

[loriverkutya]

> people act like anonymity is some kind of right, but it really wasn't in the past

it was for tens of thousands of years in the past

[wolverine876]

> it was for tens of thousands of years in the past

I wonder: Few people traveled and communities were smaller, so generally everyone knew you.

[FridayoLeary]

what's your name then?

[conjectures]

User called fnord posts bait ideas, yeah I'm not biting.

[Hyolobrika]

What about whistleblowers?