Identity is "infrastructure" government should provide via something like mDLS. A lot of work needs to go into make sure it is secure and it can be used in a way that protects privacy. Eg selective disclosure of attributes for verifying age. Pairwise pseudonyms for identity when your online identity doesn't need to be tied to you real identity, which is most of the time. Something like that would go far in dealing with sybil issues in decentralized systems, which is often the source of a lot of headaches for system designers.

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drdaeman 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity.

They (like any other entity) can attest, but such attestation should hold as few of any special value as possible.

	▲	davidgay 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity. An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc [0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church
	▲	Seattle3503 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We've seen ~20 years of people trying to solve identity without the government. We've seen plenty of solutions that can provide stable identities over time, but we haven't really seen anything that provides meaningful sybil resistance. As computer systems become more and more "autonomous", sybil resistance is increasingly the most important feature of any identity system. Any identity system that doesn't solve that problem pushes to the application layer, where it usually has UX impacts that have serious tradeoffs with adoption.