[AnthonyMouse]

> If done right, it is not incompatible with a system where identities can be reconstructed by the authorities for legal actions.

Doing it right is exactly the thing that makes this impossible. If instead you give everyone a unique barcode that every other pseudonym can be tied back to, do you really think that database will never be breached? It would become the prime target for all attackers in the world.

Meanwhile reconstructing "identities" is the least valuable thing to doing law enforcement well, because the first thing criminals will do is use someone else's identity, and then tying something to the wrong identity isn't just useless, it's actively counterproductive. The thing you need is not centralized identity but proper investigations that can tie some activity to the person pulling the strings regardless of whose name they're using.

The thing centralized identity does is precisely the opposite -- it leads you to person associated with a name, often the wrong person. You want to get the person offering to do murder for hire to think they have a contract and show up somewhere you can arrest them regardless of whether you know their name, not to convict the person whose identity they stole.

[adev_]

> Doing it right is exactly the thing that makes this impossible. [...] do you really think that database will never be breached? It would become the prime target for all attackers in the world.

Critical data is always better in the hand of a few (trustable) than in the hands of many.

That is currently the exact reason why you are using Paypal instead of giving your credit card number to everybody.

That is the exact reason why you are using a password manager.

A lot about security is about who you trust, and for how long.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Critical data is always better in the hand of a few (trustable) than in the hands of many.

Centralizing identity so that your ID number becomes "crucial data" is worse than not doing this so that the "crucial data" doesn't exist. This is the natural conclusion of your own logic -- having it in the hands of zero entities is better than having it in the hands of one.

Case in point:

> That is currently the exact reason why you are using Paypal instead of giving your credit card number to everybody.

The reason this is happening is that credit cards use the card number as a secret, which is insane.

Imagine a payment system that works like this: The merchant gives the client a request for payment, which is only the amount of the bill and the deposit routing number of the merchant -- specifically a number that can only be used to make deposits, not withdrawals. The buyer's device, using a standard protocol, then tells the buyer's bank to transfer that amount of money to the merchant. The buyer's device receives a random UUID for the transaction from their own bank and provides the UUID to the merchant.

First, notice that this would be extremely decentralized. All you need is for each financial institution to use its own prefix in its routing numbers and then the centralization is strictly to prevent different financial institutions from using the same routing prefix as one another and publish the entirely non-secret mapping from routing prefixes to depository institutions.

Second, notice that the merchant receives no information about the buyer. All they get is a random UUID that allows them to confirm with their own financial institution that the bill was paid and there is now money in their account, and even their financial institution only knows the UUID and which financial institution transferred the money to them, not which individual.

If the only thing the intermediary could discover is which bank you use and absolutely nothing that could allow them to steal your money, who needs Paypal? The fact that it doesn't work like that is the scam.

[SoftTalker]

I don't use Paypal. My credit cards protect me from fraud. And it rarely happens. In fact it's been well over a decade since I had a fraudulent charge on any of my payment cards. Funny how when there's motivation, protection happens.

[adev_]

> My credit cards protect me from fraud.

Your credit card protect you against nothing. Reimbursement in case of fraud is not fraud protection, it is just bare minimal customer service.

In fact, the first thing your bank will do when your credit card number has been leaked and was used for a fraud... is to replace your credit card.

Because they know that, when the number is in the wild, it will happen again. The system is inherently insecure in case of dataleak.

Visa and Mastercard spent decades and millions constructing systems like "3D secure" supposed to protect again that by enforcing external authentication factors. But since the system is not enforced in every country, it is still a problem today.

[zrobotics]

I'm not trying to be snarky, but it sounds like you have never had to implement an online payment system directly using a merchant account. If you've only used something like Stripe, there's a lot of requirements and compliance that the card companies do that has been abstracted away.

Visa & Mastercard have pretty singularly forced online payments to the level of security they are currently at. PCI compliance is pretty much solely driven by the card companies. If your payment details leak then yes, they want to issue you a new card. Half of that is making the customer feel better, but the other half is that the secrets need to be rotated since they've been exposed. SSH keys aren't vulnerable if generated properly, but if you expose the private key then the key needs rotated.

If you actually follow PCI compliance standards, there is no way to leak a customer's full payment details that I'm aware of. You could still leak other PII, but card # and CVC are something you can't access even with admin privileges on your recurring billing app.

So the card companies do quite a lot to protect against fraud and make people comfortable using their cards for online purchases. They just do this by requiring merchants to follow specific minimum practices. I'm not trying to glaze them, there is more they could do; and they do this to protect their bottom line. But fraud charges cost them a lot of money, and their interests align with consumers in this case to prevent fraud as much as they can.