I think that building a web of trust would be highly valuable to a much safer and decentralized economy and global community.
TL;DR: centralized systems are the current form of this and those centralized systems are one of the most compromised security risks posed on our society. This moves us to a decentralized solution and should be designed in a way that is associated with different aspects of who you are can be split up and used in different contexts much like your social media identity and medical identity aren’t shouldn’t be sitting in the same database.
If I can dream a bit though and talk a bit more about how this type of identity system could benefit us.
Right now, many of us are beholden to our in person reputation that is verified by our faces and other biometrics (fingerprints, etc…) held by centralized governments that – as discussed heavily in this site – easily become systems of oppression and the very information that says who you are and if you’re a legal citizen is all in the hands of this centralized system run by (in the US’ case) ~550 federal government officials to about 340M citizens.
I believe that moving towards more decentralized technology will distribute power and remove the need for larger and centralized states to do all this bookkeeping. This enables me to understand you not necessarily as the human body attached to the keyboard, but as a trusted account that can be verified cryptographically.
We can also have identities in this system that do associate with our flesh and blood bodies that could replace things like passports, reputation systems on social media, etc…
For example, most people can look up the identity I’ve tied to profile pictures of my face and know where I’ve worked by looking up my LinkedIn, seeing what languages I’ve coded in, if I work nicely with others, and my documentation skills by looking up my GitHub, or seeing positive or negative reviews I’ve left or that were left about me and my business over time.
The privacy part is that you can have your anon identities if you are doing journalistic activiites, or providing open counterintelligence over remaining sovereign states that are declaring war against small anarchosyndicalist communes (futuristic me can only dream).
The account that associates to your flesh and blood can be more useful for in person social situations where you need to establish you’re a trustworthy citizen of the globe. Now, I can’t speak too much of the specifics in terms of how transparent we could become if larger systems can’t use that information to repress us, but ultimately, you choose what information gets associated with different identities of yourself, what is public, and what is private, and you can establish your identity in a cryptographic manner.
