[vinay_ys]

> With a web-of-trust, friends or family could vouch for your name, age or location; landlords could vouch for your address; employers could vouch for your skills; customers could vouch for businesses; and so on. As it doesn’t rely on government databases, but rather the people you know, it is truly decentralized and accessible.

This is literally how it works in majority of the real world; except for things where government has a role to play; most common case is taxes. If you are a landlord and collect rent from tenant and if either of you want to make tax related claims to the government, then you will have to provide/quote each other's government recognized identity in your tax returns.

For large parts of the population in the lower socio-economic strata, even this won't be relevant. And that reliance on that web-of-trust is the problem for them due to class discrimination etc. Hence, having a government issued identity (as a universal right) which acts as an anchor to which trusted attestations can be attached to is critical to make a difference in the life of the last person in that socio-economic line.

This is in essence the basis for India's identity system Aadhaar[1] – which is super minimal identity system – just biometrics (fingerprint, iris scan, head/shoulder photo, gender) – mapped to a a 12 digit number (basically a unique key in its database); plus 3 additional demographic fields – name, age (date of birth), address – which require external anchor proofs (which are very weak proofs). Here's the full list of accepted proofs - https://uidai.gov.in/images/commdoc/valid_documents_list.pdf

1. https://uidai.gov.in