[vintermann]

The problem isn't anonymity as such. I don't think there would be much problem with anonymous posts, provided we could be confident the anonymous poster actually was just one guy who spoke for himself, at a reasonable rate.

But you have anonymous posters who speak under hundreds of names to give their opinions the illusion of popularity; argue with their own accounts to set up straw men and steer discussion away from things that threaten them, and post hundreds of times more than the average users.

I think there must be solutions to this, I'm sad so few people seem to be working on it. Shouldn't there be a way for instance, using good old fashioned cryptography (I.e. NOT some tradeable token junk), to leverage a strong ID service to prevent sockpuppeting in a forum without revealing much to either the forum owner or the ID service?

Once we had that - a basic safety that everyone you engaged with on a certain forum was a real person, and this person (whoever he was) didn't operate under other names on that forum (or if he had earlier names, that they were irreversibly retired) - a lot of sensible things would become possible which are largely pointless today, such as speaking limits and distributed/allotted moderation.