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Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

> There is no shared protocol for identity, no agreed standard for portable, user-owned data, no common infrastructure for composable interaction.

I've heard this idea in several forms, and it's not what I think most people want.

I don't want to live in a world where everything is trackable to a stable identity. Since the stable identity is ultimately trackable to your socual security number, this is essentially a world in which all of your online activity is trackable to your SSN.

You can see why this is valuable to some people. And if you want to monetize everyone's data it's an important first step.

But it's firmly in the authoritarian camp where everyone is monitored and tracked. And that I think is still contrary to how most people want to live their life.

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We need a system for digital identity that can be confidently connected to a singular living organism. That identity acts as a sort of credential. With that credential, you can anonymously take online action that is untraceable to the identity, besides knowing the anon identity is a real, singular human.

If you can follow that logic, you will see that this makes many, many things possible. Anonymous credentials are possible right now and extend to anything. It can represent "this anon identity is a PhD in physics", "this one is a lawyer with 5 years experience in criminal law", etc. But this sort of mechanism starts with being able to say "this is a singular person, with identity verified by X mechanism".

It is absolutely foundational and the opposite of dystopian. It allows us to combat every current dystopian mechanism without creating any additional compared to what already exists.

The system you are describing exists already, in China. And indeed it "makes many, many things possible". For one, it makes the concept of a ticket meaningless: either your "single living organism" (i.e. biometric ID) has permission to enter the movie theater, or get on the train, or whatever, or it doesn't. The hassle reduction is enormous! And it is also widely considered dystopian.

Clearly the crucial issue is the "untraceability" of the ID. In practice somebody is going to have to know who is who, and in practice the state is going to arrogate that role, as perhaps it should. So the fundamental question is whether it is possible to make the state democratically accountable.

No, it actually doesn't. The system I am describing is not controllable by a state actor.

> If you can follow that logic

I can't, because it's not logical. You want a credential that provides exactly one bit of information with certainty. It's not at all clear that something like that exists or if it did, how you would prevent multiple people from sharing the same credential if it was also actually possible to use it anonymously.

> It can represent "this anon identity is a PhD in physics", "this one is a lawyer with 5 years experience in criminal law",

You're saying the credential can leak information about the user. You don't need many of these bits of information to de-anonymize someone.

I didn't say any of this...

There are methods to produce anon credentials without tying it to an identity, independent of any other credential claims. It doesn't leak any information at all. What are you on about?

Separate from actual-human-identity, a internet-facing digital system needs some concept of user identity to provide privacy. Either people authenticate, or you share data publicly - where is the middle road here? How do you come back and reauthenticate with a private system later if you don't have a stable identity for the system to recognise?

I'm not sure what's forcing these DIDs being one-to-one with a human, or why have the ability to create as many pseudonomynous identities as you like results in centralization or authoritarianism?

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/06/28/zkid.html Counter Points

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