[maratc]

That's kinda theoretic discussion by now. As the whole COVID thing is behind us, we can probably look at all the money that were spent in the world to create vaccination certificates, sign them, create the distribution network, distribute the certificates, build the verifying scanners, purchase them en-masse and pay the thousands of people who were standing at the entrance of numerous shopping malls and using these scanners to check the QR codes, only to create a system that is trivially bypassed by using a jpeg file.

[stavros]

I'm not sure how this relates to the main argument that "digital IDs are bad because they lead to perfect enforcement".

[maratc]

My argument is that “digital ids can’t be faked” is a bad argument, and if you rely on it to prove a point then it might be a weak proof.

(Digital IDs indeed can’t be faked but usually they are a part of a process that can be easily bypassed by using something that presents itself as a valid Digital ID even if it’s not.)

[stavros]

They'll be a part of a process that can be easily bypassed until they're the only thing that's accepted.

[maratc]

I don't think they will, as this will leave a significant amount of population without ids. The fallback will always be there.

Credit cards are a great example: they can't be faked, however while the cryptographers are sitting on their high hill and patting themselves on the back for doing great job, the credit card fraud rings billions of dollars every month. It doesn't happen because of fake cards -- it happens by exploiting the flaws in the whole process that a (non-fakeable) card is a part of.