I argue for and advocate that this capability should exist, but not be mandatory. If you do not want to tie your personal identity to your digital identity, certainly, you should be able to not do so and rely solely on a cryptographic primitive, recovery key, or other digital mechanism to govern access of last resort. If your account access is lost forever, it's on you and that was a choice that was made.
> Somehow you have to establish that you are the owner of the account, in a way that nobody else can do it. This is very much not a trivial problem, and government IDs don't provide any kind of solution to it.
This is actually very easy. You can identity proof someone through Stripe Identity [1] for ~$2/transaction. There are of course other private companies who will do this. You bind this identity to the digital identity once, when you have a high identity assurance level (IAL). Account recovery is then trivial.
> If you need a driver's license, how do you get a driver's license? With a birth certificate? Okay, how do you get a copy of your birth certificate when you don't have a driver's license?
This is government's problem luckily, not that of private companies who would need to offer account identity bootstrapping. Does the liquor store or bar care where you got your government ID? The notary? The bank? They do not, because they trust the government to issue these credentials. They simply require the state of federal government credential. Based on the amount of crypto fraud that has occurred (~$72B and counting [2]), government identity web of trust is much more robust than "not your keys, not your crypto" and similar digital only primitives.
NIST 800-63 should answer any questions you might have I have not already answered: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ (NIST Digital Identity Guidelines)
> This is actually very easy. You can identity proof someone through Stripe Identity [1] for ~$2/transaction.
"Pay someone else to do it" is easy in the sense that doing the hard thing is now somebody else's problem, not in the sense that doing it is not hard. That also seems like a compliance service -- you are required to KYC, service provides box-checking for the regulatory requirement -- not something that can actually determine if someone is using a fraudulent ID, e.g. because they breached some DMV or some other company's servers and now have access to their customers' IDs.
> This is government's problem luckily, not that of private companies who would need to offer account identity bootstrapping.
But it's actually the user's problem if it means the government's system has poor security and allows someone else to gain access to their account.
> Based on the amount of crypto fraud that has occurred (~$72B and counting [2]), government identity web of trust is much more robust than "not your keys, not your crypto" and similar digital only primitives.
The vast majority of these are from custodial services, i.e. the things that don't keep the important keys in the hands of the users. Notably this number (which is global) is less than the losses from identity theft in the US alone.
The general problem also stems from "crypto transactions are irreversible" rather than "crypto transactions are secured by secrets". Systems with irreversible transactions are suitable for storing and transferring moderate amounts of value, as for example the amount of ordinary cash a person might keep in their wallet. People storing a hundred million dollars in a crypto wallet and not physically securing the keys like they're a hundred million dollars in gold bars are the fools from the saying about fools and their money.
> If you need a driver's license, how do you get a driver's license? With a birth certificate? Okay, how do you get a copy of your birth certificate when you don't have a driver's license?
Using vitalchek, you can order a BC with a notarized document, using two people who have valid IDs as people to vouch for your identity. I've done it for multiple clients.
There also has to be someone that needs the BC to see the notary. But, for the most part, yes, it's that easy to obtain a BC using vitalchek.
Note: The notary will record the ID #s and other info of the two ID holders. So if something goes wrong, the two ID holders will be on the hook as well.
Once the notarized document is submitted to vitalchek, they'll process the request.
Of course, one would still have to know a few details from the BC (parents, location, etc) to get vitalchek to submit the request to the county/city registrar.
> Note: The notary will record the ID #s and other info of the two ID holders. So if something goes wrong, the two ID holders will be on the hook as well.
Though of course this is a method of fraudulently obtaining an official ID, so you do need to be concerned that the people engaged in that sort of enterprise might already have a couple of them.
> Of course, one would still have to know a few details from the BC (parents, location, etc) to get vitalchek to submit the request to the county/city registrar.
Which is the sort of thing that gets collected in big databases which then get breached and published on the internet.
> Somehow you have to establish that you are the owner of the account, in a way that nobody else can do it. This is very much not a trivial problem, and government IDs don't provide any kind of solution to it.
This is actually very easy. You can identity proof someone through Stripe Identity [1] for ~$2/transaction. There are of course other private companies who will do this. You bind this identity to the digital identity once, when you have a high identity assurance level (IAL). Account recovery is then trivial.
> If you need a driver's license, how do you get a driver's license? With a birth certificate? Okay, how do you get a copy of your birth certificate when you don't have a driver's license?
This is government's problem luckily, not that of private companies who would need to offer account identity bootstrapping. Does the liquor store or bar care where you got your government ID? The notary? The bank? They do not, because they trust the government to issue these credentials. They simply require the state of federal government credential. Based on the amount of crypto fraud that has occurred (~$72B and counting [2]), government identity web of trust is much more robust than "not your keys, not your crypto" and similar digital only primitives.
NIST 800-63 should answer any questions you might have I have not already answered: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ (NIST Digital Identity Guidelines)
[1] https://stripe.com/identity
[2] https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/charts/top
(customer identity is a component of my work in financial services)