[littlestymaar]

Anonymity is important for many things. But on the flip side it's responsible of many issues with the internet today, because it makes moderation pretty much impossible (anyone can always just create a new account).

What we're missing is a way to have cryptographically secure pseudonymity: you log in to a website, you don't give any information whatsoever, but you cannot make two different accounts.

[pixl97]

Most likely because your second sentence is impossible in one way or another.

Even if it's some kind of government encoded key, governments cannot be trusted to create imaginary people and hand them out to companies like palantir for large scale population manipulation.

[littlestymaar]

I can imagine a government creating a moderate number of fake profiles for use by police and intelligence services, and honestly I'm fine with it, but creating a ghost population for propaganda purpose is entirely different and if you live in a country where you cannot trust your government not to do something that bad, you're already screwd.

In any case, it is still better than the status quo where even foreign authoritarian states can do that in countries where the local government wouldn't.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

Do you propose to only let people from a whitelist of countries use internet? Because many countries would have no qualms giving their troll farms bunch of fake electronic ids.

[littlestymaar]

It wouldn't be the internet as a whole, and instead be done at the individual service level (potentially with big plateforms being regulated in what they accept)

And indeed, it is to be expected that some countries be banned from most of the internet, or at least get a read-only version of it, because their digital credentials aren't deemed trustworthy enough. Not unlike how the travel visa system works nowadays.