[lxgr]

> What we need is a system that allows people to easily create new IDs, that updates contacts that people choose.

> Contacts would need to be always online.

That also sounds impractical.

> It's a required ID to use the internet

How does any of that follow? Having a reusable self-sovereign ID format for those scenarios where people want to share it is very different from having an authority-issued ID format that's mandatory for some interaction.

As a concrete example: I have an iMessage (CKV), Signal, WhatsApp, and GPG identity key, but I don't need to provide any of them when ordering pizza online. But what I can't do is choosing to use the same key for my same number on both e.g. Signal and iMessage to make it easier for people to switch between messengers without having to re-verify me.

A hypothetical shared key format would fix that, but would (hopefully!) still allow me to create multiple keys/identities for multiple contexts, and to not provide any persistent identity when it's not necessary.

[irq-1]

If the ID is permanent then governments will require it, because they can. If it has attestations or endorsements, governments will require a government endorsement. Think about what China, Iran or Russia would do with a permanent ID being a standard. The US, England and the EU are not immune to the same impulses.

Always online is no different than an email account or website, and the rate of change would be, at least, minutes not seconds.

[lxgr]

If governments want to do these things, they already can. Phone numbers are KYCed in many countries, for example, and many messengers mandatorily require them.

The lack of an interoperable key standard isn’t stopping them. (In fact, it’s even helping a bit by providing cover for MITM snooping)

[voxic11]

look into "sealed sender" schemes, they allow the recipient to verify the sender identity without allowing anyone else to verify the sender identity. So making use of such a scheme allows you to prevent governments or corporations from intercepting even the metadata of communications (and of course E2EE prevents intercepting the contents).