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Comment by praveenster | Hacker News Reader

This might be an interesting avenue for the tech community to come up with a solution similar to digital certificates and apply it to SSN numbers with an RFC of sorts that gets whetted by security experts and submitted to the government as a proposal to fix the problem long term.

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The thing is, it has to work completely offline. Not everyone uses computers.

Sure, but a public key could still be stored in the case of a security audit. And I don’t think the majority of mass breaching are on the paper level. We need a solution to allow a new revision of an identity to be issued, possible something block chain like.

Why does the block chain have to be applied to every problem? We already have a solution for this, many businesses and the US military use it - smart cards.

Generate a private key on the card, have the government sign it, keep it locked up with a PIN/password (and self destruct after X number of invalid attempts). You can verify authenticity offline as long as you can request the card to sign a response and verify the signature, problem solved.

It doesn't but it would be more ideal to have a decentralized identification system.

What would the blockchain bring to this? Nothing but a dependence on computers, and an inability for those without computers to use the system.

The risk is ONLINE..

The risk is not limited to online. And the use is most definitely not limited to online.

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