That's a very strong and parochial claim.

Good, reliable, trustworthy, functioning government has existed for between 5,000 and 10,000 years depending on which anthropology you follow.

For almost all of that time, governments have had scant legibility into the size or makeup of their population, barring a rather crude census every now and then.

Identity at individual granularity happened practically yesterday, and is still a project in progress for many nation states. It's really a function of global travel, banking systems, modern social welfare benefits and healthcare.

A well designed government does not need micro-relations with each and every citizen, but works fine in aggregation, devolved autonomous subsystems and heuristics.

The "Government needs to know all about you" is a technocratic conceit less than 100 years old.

I remember, as a kid, when Canada rolled out the Social Insurance Number, only for tax use! Now it's used for everything.

And later... health cards! Used to be, you'd just wander into a hospital.

Now you need endless id for everything.

50 years only!

It's really absurd.

There are plenty of non-dystopian ways for people to do that. I was able to prove that I'm ComposedPattern by typing my password. For a higher-stakes identity, I might provide biometrics or show that my appearance matches a previously-provided photo. Those things are possible without involving the state. In fact, it might surprise you to learn that people got healthcare and paid for housing before the early 20th century! The government doesn't enable people to prove who they are. It forces people to use a single state-controlled identity for, at first, just government services... then finance, then healthcare, then transportation... and now there are bills being proposed everywhere to require government ID for "age verification" to use porn sites or "social media".

Or one could simply trust a democratically elected government with that instead...

That said I personally agree with you.

FWIW: buying with owned funds is easy, selling is hard. Sellers don't really care about identity verification as long as the funds are good. OTOH, buyers/lenders/title insurance issuers do want the sellers' identities to be solid, because if they transacted with the wrong person, they are going to have a bad day. Lenders probably also want the buyer to be well identified, because it'll be a mess if not.

It took quite a while to work out something that would be accepted for the title transfer.

it is intellectually dishonest, or motivated reasoning as they say, to imply that I said anything to the contrary. Perhaps you can reconsider that assessment of the comment ?

Did I read this wrong? It sounded like you were insinuating that these use cases shouldn't required strong identity assurance. If that is not what you meant, I apologize for reading the statement incorrectly. If identity credentials are provided at low or no cost to prevent marginalization or disenfranchisement, I see no issue. Those credentials are then leveraged for all other systems that require identity proofing. That widow will need to prove who they are for social security benefits, medicare, or to receive an estate from a deceased partner (including removing them from their home's deed if held together, or accepting retirement accounts as a beneficiary). That college student will need to prove who they are for government funding aid, student loans, and to enroll. Disenfranchisement is very real, but so is identity fraud.

People who want strong privacy and governance around identity aren't wrong, they are simply solving at the wrong OSI layer by saying the technical implementation of identity systems shouldn't be good. Fix tech problems with tech, fix people problems with people.

If you've been in the industry for any significant amount of time (over a decade), you'd know that the way things work out is

A) Solve all problems (including people problems) with tech.

B) Create new problems as a result.

C) Goto A

D) As loopcount of A-C increases, the familiarity with how to solve people problems successfully and fully with people starts to wane.

E) Crappy people problem solving systems technically solved require and equip newer generations with survival skills to navigate the flawed technical solution, but not with the flexibility or experience to thrive in an environment without said systems or imagine an alternative process.

F) The world begins to look more and more insane and delocalized over time to new entrants, who now have to cope with the fact that biology equipped us to handle local state management, but increasingly, remote state management is becoming a required survival skill.

G) Human beings do not have network cards integrated into their biology. (Thank god.)

H) Duct taping on the technical solution to G) just makes the original problem we're trying to solve even harder.

I) Somewhere in here is a Paxos joke.

I'll even offer the example of blockchains and cryptocurrencies as an example of this flow.

Our financial system pre-2000's was heavily "Oh, this is a people problem", with heavy employment of "develop a human relationship to get things done." Post 00's, with things like AML/KYC, our institutions are skewing such that the digital metadata (and not the relationship between persons) is the kernel for getting things. This makes identity fraud easier, because now instead of your bank people getting to know everybody, it's "computer says yes/no". Enter cryptocurrencies (the penultimate technical solution, no human involved, just shluffing bits between private keys). Nobody knows anyone anymore. Nobody wants to. The reversal and fatfinger problem still exists and is even worse over those mediums. Now we also have new problems from everyone wanting to take all this financial activity and make it public. Making the original ID/Trust problem even worse.

Now everyone is required to understand network theory and distributed systems to be able to hew out a local truth state, but maximally ill equipped to do the actual hewing, because the skills that got you that truth state in the first place were social, which we've done everything possible to technically engineer away.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.