[aaronax]

You have to have intrusive barriers. This is true in real life and it is true online.

The world is not a graffiti free-for-all because there are barriers: the government (police) is able to apprehend individuals, link that physical individual to an identity (which it issued at birth), and effectively implement consequences to that identity/individual.

If you want your site to not be a graffiti free-for-all, you will need a durable way to identify actual people. Twitter, for example, essentially requires a phone number to use their site. Phone numbers are fairly difficult to get anonymously. Therefore, Twitter has a useful link between their users and a physical individual. Other services use other things.

The government should implement cryptographic certificate based identities to citizens. Ideally there would be a way to "sign" something that says you are a real citizen without revealing which citizen you are, but is durably unique (subsequent signings identify you as the same citizen).

Facebook, Google, etc. are effectively filling this function right now but they leave much to be desired.

[hopfog]

> Ideally there would be a way to "sign" something that says you are a real citizen without revealing which citizen you are, but is durably unique (subsequent signings identify you as the same citizen).

This is a truly interesting and groundbreaking idea that would solve all my problems. Do you know if there are any initiatives like that or is it science-fiction?

[aaronax]

Actually issued by a government? Not sure.

How to implement? Also not sure. I am not an expert in this field. "Anonymous credentials" seems like the closest thing maybe. Basically you need to somehow prove you have a valid signed certificate without disclosing the public key.

https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/83412/how-to-achi... https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/52189/zero-knowle...

Since you seem open to putting up barriers...in the process of looking into this I discovered Idena and checked it out a little. You could required verified Idena something or other, just as an example. I'm sure there are scores of these types of things being built, most or all of which will fail to gain traction.

[dejawu]

I don't know if a government would use it, but 4chan has tripcodes that can uniquely identify an anonymous user across multiple posts without the user ever needing to create a permanent identity.