I agree that there's a lack of awareness of what happens in other countries with ID, but I think it is also a different situation in the US.

States in the US in a lot of ways are more comparable to countries in the EU. It's not exactly like that but in many ways it is. So it would be like requiring an EU ID on top of a national ID.

I also don't think privacy per se is the real issue of concern, it's concern about consolidation of federalized power. Privacy is one criterion by which you judge the extent to which power has been consolidated or can be consolidated.

The question isn't "can this be federalized safely in theory", it's "is it necessary to federalize this" or "what is the worse possible outcome of this if abused?"

As we are seeing recently, whatever can be abused in terms of consolidated power will be eventually, given enough time.

I guess discussions of whether or not you can have cryptographic verification with anonymity kind of miss the point at some level. It's good to be mindful of in case we go down the dystopian surveillance route, but it ignores the bigger picture issues about freedom of speech, government control over access (cryptographic guarantees of credential verfication don't guarantee issuance of the id appropriately, nor do they guarantee that the card will be issued with that cryptographic system implemented in good faith), and so forth.