The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

Fully agree. I've had the opportunity to work on identity at 2 former employers. We tried to push things in this direction as part of exploration work including discussions with Mozilla around Persona and much more. Unfortunately every time, we met a fairly insurmountable problem - most users just don't get it, and even if they get it, they don't care.

I agree this is where things need to move, but we need to make it so simple that users who don't care can still use it and those who do can get the most out of it.

As the article mentions, centralized trust has proven that it reaches a certain maximum before being plagued by political, legal, and corruption. I don't know much about the China's state ID system, but based on other systems they've rolled out, I'm sure with enough money and the right contacts you can wipe, fabricate, or change your ID (which is also true for the US). Centralized systems have to also undertake the same problems as decentralized ones, like ensuring records are kept updated, which is no trivial task when providing identity for millions of people(1)

(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/06/25/irs-stim...

It's not meant to be purely democratic. The founders were students of history and recognized the inherent instability of pure democracies. There were no human rights recognized anywhere in the world in 1776. The imperial era was still a thing and Kings and queens still had vast influence over European politics, with various other centralized power structures in virtually all parts of the world. I get that it's easy to point out the hypocrisy of the phrase "all men are created equal" when slavery was still a thing in half the states, but it was a very tenuous situation to go against the crown of England in 1776. It was far from guaranteed. A lot of people see the human rights we have today as some sort of inevitable outcome of progress, but China is case in point that progress and time do not necessarily yield more rights for more people. China is 4000 years old and they still don't even have basic freedom of speech there.

All of human history is filled with bloodshed, tyranny, endless wars, conquering, slavery, piracy, vandalism, raiding parties, human sacrifice, religious battles and authoritarianism, with just a few punctuating moments of anything resembling democracy and recognition of human rights. That goes for every race, country, tribe, continent and creed. No heritage is innocent of that. That's the truth. 1776 didn't have to succeed. It very much could of ended with being squelched by the Crown and then where would we be today? Perhaps the Nazis would of won. Perhaps the Soviets would have developed imperial ambition in the absence of a strong US to keep them in check. Maybe the world would be a darker place. I suspect that without the U.S. that it would be, since that's the rule of history and not the exception.

Interning the Japanese Americans was of course wrong, but when you're fighting a world war and tens of millions are dying at the hands of Japanese (they slaughtered Chinese by the tens of millions)...it's very touchy isn't it? The lesser of two evils in that particular war was certainly the U.S.

Again, prior to world war 2 the world was still filled with imperial forces itching to conquer and enslave other people by the tens of millions. This is just 80 years ago...not that long ago. There was no where else in the world living up to the high ideals we seek to achieve today back then. The U.S. was that place for so many people to escape to. The Jews being one group. The Cubans being another. The Vietnamese being another. The Koreans being another. If you're going to paint the picture, paint it in the context of the world at the time and the subsequent actions in the wake of those problems. I think individuals deserve forgiveness after some time, and the same goes with nations, given that their behavior is corrected. There's nothing wrong with the movement towards more civil rights. But expecting things to go from millenia of imperialism to utopian democracy overnight, especially one saddled with so much legacy from that era, is naive. Again, it didn't have to go so well. It could have very gone south and ended up worse off for everyone.

>I've never understood that way of viewing things. For me identity is a right.

Historically "identity" wasn't a right, but something imposed on people, for better tracking and controlling them by authorities...

>In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country?

Oppression is not about democratic vs totalitarian state. McCarthy and Hoover, to mention just two examples, reigned over others in the good ole democratic US of A.

Not to mention very few (if any) countries have actual direct democracy, or give the people say in how they want to be governed, from the constitution and downwards.

We literally had this with OpenID. If I remember correctly, it pre-dated Facebook and the flurry of "Login with XXX" type authentications. But the corporations like their walled gardens too much and OpenID fell out of favor.