I need to put my personal information in a public ledger, and then waste energy to prove it is correct?
Misc central authorities issue you secure enclaves. Dept of licensing, health care system, banks, github, employer, etc.
You then create key pairs as needed.
Publish those public keys to misc web's of trust, as needed.
Then use private digitally sign anything you think worth signing.
Log those transactions to the misc blockchains, as needed.
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The alternative to authenticity is our current Freedom Speeches™ dystopia. Bots, sock puppets, identity theft industry, fraud, etc.
For all the naysayers: Would you install unsigned, untrusted code? If you answer yes, then stuff like privacy and authenticity isn't really your priority.
Choose wisely.
> Would you install unsigned, untrusted code?
Yes. I trust javascript from https://google.com the same as javascript from http://dodgywarez.example.com. Both get executed in a javascript VM, nested in a KVM VM, off of my main desktop machine. Security based on making sure that there is someone to sue just doesn't scale.
Would you bank online via HTTP (vs HTTPS)?
When I was doing nodejs work, npm artifacts still weren't being signed. Sure, some people play in traffic. Doesn't mean we all should.
People arguing against privacy & authenicity always remind me of a coworker who emphatically opposed password managers or any system whatsoever for managing secrets. Something something "single point of failure".
The thing about security is that it's inherently a multi party problem. Some party that is able to identify me is increasing their own security, but likely at the expense of decreasing my own security. You speak of authenticity, yet there is a good reason chat protocols don't stop at naive signatures, and actually increase their complexity for additional properties like repudiation.
Sure, many activities prudently require a way to reasonably identify people and have an acceptable downside. And sometimes when individuals' security is broken, society benefits (eg DKIM being used to verify leaked email authenticity). But there are many more that do not need such things, and in fact doing so would harm our freedom (the examples I gave).
You seem to be staking out the position that some sort of universal identity would be a good thing, including for casual Internet communication ("Bots, sock puppets"). I wholeheartedly disagree with this.
Nihilism. For future, maybe lead with that. Save everyone a bit of angst.