Finding vulnerable Twitter accounts with expired domains

If you use a third party service for your email ID, the third party can ban you or like you mention - disappear and basically take your identity away.

If you rely on national ID cards, you have another set of problems.

If you rely on phone numbers, these can be sim-jacked.

If you rely on bio-authentication methods, you risk your privacy especially when the master database gets compromised.

Relying on any single source seems to be a recipe for disaster. Perhaps the solution is to have multiple ways to authenticate yourself, with different levels of credibility and to let as many of them survive as possible. Phone numbers and email IDs seem to have similar levels of credibility, but I haven't seen domain name service providers take to phone number authentication as much as I would have liked, but things are looking up. Alternatives could be backup codes, which some registrar's use if you have 2fa enabled.

From Ursula K. LeGuin's indispensable "Dispossessed":

“You're really much too polite for ...”

“For what?”

“For an anarchist,” she said, in her thin and affectedly drawling voice (it was the same intonation Pae used, and Oiie when he was at the University). “I'm disappointed. I thought you'd be dangerous and uncouth.”

“I am.”

She glanced up at him sidelong. She wore a scarlet shawl tied over her head; her eyes looked black and bright against the vivid color and the whiteness of snow all around.

“But here you are tamely walking me to the station, Dr. Shevek.”

“Shevek,” he said mildly. “No `doctor.'”

“Is that your whole name — first and last?”

He nodded, smiling. He felt well and vigorous, pleased by the bright air, the warmth of the well-made coat he wore, the prettiness of the woman beside him. No worries or heavy thoughts had hold on him today.

“Is it true that you get your names from a computer?”

“Yes.”

“How dreary, to be named by a machine!”

“Why dreary?”

“It's so mechanical, so impersonal.”

“But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?”

“No one else? You're the only Shevek?”

“While I live. There were others, before me.”

“Relatives, you mean?”

“We don't count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see. I don't know who they were, except for one, in the early years of the Settlement. She designed a kind of bearing they use in heavy machines, they still call it a `shevek.'” He smiled again, more broadly. “There is a good immortality!”

Vea shook her head. “Good Lord!” she said. “How do you tell men from women?”

“Well, we have discovered methods...”

...

The five- and six-letter names issued by the central registry computer, being unique to each living individual, took the place of the numbers which a computer-using society must otherwise attach to its members. An Anarresti needed no identification but his name. The name therefore, was felt to be an important part of the self, though one no more chose it than one's nose or height.

What agency manages BankID in Sweden? I would imagine in a better world, the US Postal Service could be doing some of this work in the states at a federal level, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.

This way we can verify/prove our identity without handing over those markers to multiple 3rd parties.