[AnthonyMouse]

> It's a very simple safe primitive. You can build endless infrastructure on top of it.

It has nothing to do with the primitive. Someone will find a flaw in the implementation, or human flaws in the bureaucracy that administers it.

And building infrastructure on top of it is the flaw. These things should all be independent of one another.

[rjzzleep]

The flaw right now is that you guys believe that all online identity needs to be decoupled from the online identity. There are a couple things you guys dismiss or don't think about:

1. Contrary to systems such as the German one this identity system actually has a working upgrade and revokation path. The German one was is assuming that it's safe by design and the identity being fixed. The German ID keys don't have a revokation system and they don't expire either.

2. The baltic system has expiry's on these private keys. They are authenticated against your physical government issued ID with background checks being done by the current existing police/interpol infrastructure.

These private keys are not isolated from your identity. You receive them from government institutions that use the exist physical identity infrastructure.

The problem with people here is that they want the digital identity to be completely self contained. I get that sentiment and I don't disagree with it, but it's a completely different goal from what is being solved here.

This solves - in a much better fashion - what a lot of "crypto" fanatics want governments to use.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Contrary to systems such as the German one this identity system actually has a working upgrade and revokation path.

Systems without this are even more broken, but this is hardly the main problem.

The problem is that with a system like this, if you can compromise one person, you can compromise them totally. You compromise every part of their life that uses this system instead of just one when it's isolated from the others.

And if you can compromise that system itself, even temporarily, you can compromise everyone that comprehensively at once. Everyone's health records, stolen. Bank accounts drained. Trade secrets published or sold to foreign competitors.

Canceling their credentials after the fact doesn't undo all the damage.

> These private keys are not isolated from your identity. You receive them from government institutions that use the exist physical identity infrastructure.

In most cases this is a liability rather than an asset. It's only useful if you for some reason need to prove your physical government identity, e.g. so you can vote. But those few things can use the same process you use to bootstrap into this identity system to begin with.

If all you want to do is sign into a website or acquire a book or a contraceptive or travel, having that tied to your government identity is bad.