| A government ID is a lot more than that. I have an official ID card that has: - A bunch of personal identifying data including a unique number (which is as much of a secret as my name or my date of birth) - A bunch of old-timey security stuff like thumbprint and signature - An RFID chip containing all this info, ICAO 9303 compliant - A PIN protected certificate that I can use to sign documents digitally - Several security measures to make falsifying it very hard Everybody who lives in this country has one of these, and these features are not uncommon for ID cards to have in other countries. It also has the full backing of the state, which means that if I lose it I can easily get a new one, and is very illegal for somebody to use it to impersonate me, or to create a false one. I'm not sure what advantages I or my fellow citizens would gain by moving to a distributed system in charge of some foreign capitalists who have never even been to this country. |