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For non-government purposes this ID can be useful. But it is not a replacement for legal ID. It's worth pursuing for edge cases, but let's not pretend it will protect people.

This whole thing is an attempt at a technological fix for a non-technological problem. It's not practical to 'route around' bad or missing government. The logistics behind each one of these issues goes far beyond having a simple ID.

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For places like Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, trust is so incontrovertibly broken that there is no clear path back to central government and rule of law. Government has to start where it has always started, with circles of trust.

This system isn't a hack or 'route around' these circles of trust, it simply makes them verifiable, persistent and mobile. Eventually, once they get large enough, then they can lead to stable, centralised government.

It's not very different from the way circles of trust for lending eventually became large, national banks.

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