They maintained census, but for government functions (like accounting and taxes), and actual identity communication almost never involved government.
Passports use for anything except international travel is a very modern thing as well.
For most of the history the source of identify was individual themselves (as it should be), that is, one told their name and origin and others accepted that, unless someone knew otherwise.
We've seen ~20 years of people trying to solve identity without the government. We've seen plenty of solutions that can provide stable identities over time, but we haven't really seen anything that provides meaningful sybil resistance. As computer systems become more and more "autonomous", sybil resistance is increasingly the most important feature of any identity system. Any identity system that doesn't solve that problem pushes to the application layer, where it usually has UX impacts that have serious tradeoffs with adoption.
I understand this. I also understand that if history teaches us anything it’s that any centralized governance (of any nature, not just traditional national and regional governments, but any centrally organized communities, like corporations) is to be constantly distrusted and kept in check, and even then it’s dangerous to let it take over social functions. That’s why I wrote “only as a last resort”, that is, unless and until someone thinks of something better. (And then switching over is another issue… that may need some pre-planning even better new solution exists.)
Or maybe someday we’ll have some interesting revelations about personal identity and sybil resistance won’t be necessary. But that’ll probably be only some centuries later.
To be clear, all we need from the government is to establish a person really exists and verify basic properties. We don't need more than that, so we can and should use all cryptography at our disposal (and invent more) to prevent any more information disclosure to both services and government.
I get that identity is a sort of last holdout for the tech libertarians of old. But after years working in KYC, what I saw was the accumulation of vast amounts of sensitive information held by private actors in a way that was completely democratically unaccountable and couldn't be corrected by the average citizen. It's time to bring identity out of the shadows and make it ours to control.
For establishing facts about person, the problem is, hostile governments are not unknown to revoke passports and cause all sorts of trouble. And if the government is benign that doesn’t mean it never turns hostile. We really don’t want to allow governments to disappear people, not physically, nor digitally.
I’m not a libertarian (was; realized why it doesn’t work in reality we have), but I still believe that no entity ever should be able to deny one’s identity, they can only refuse to attest it.
And the more serious problem is that nowadays we’re collectively so much into that flawed paradigm of “identity providers”[1] I’m afraid if a government-ran system happens it’ll would be still built in the same paradigm and engrave that into collective consciousness even further.
Private corporate-ran identities are IMHO better for the foreseeable interim, until we know for sure how to do things right. Because I suspect that whatever we pick as fundamental ideas is going to stick and bless or curse us for a long while. Nation states have longer lifespans than Internet companies popularity, so as weird as that may sound I’d prefer Gmail to, say, that Estonian X.509 scheme (no offense meant; and I’m only considering use outside of government services), despite latter being short-term better.
And - yes - I 100% agree that it’s past the time we should be using proper cryptography for attestation of all sorts, rather than sending passport photos and live selfies to increasingly more and more private companies. But that shouldn’t be general identity verification, it should be only for compliance, only when a law forces to obtain some information from some government-issued credentials. This part desperately needs moderation. But for the love of what’s still sane - unless we find ourselves with an unavoidable need and no other choice, let’s not use that for any other purposes, for now, please?
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[1]: My view and understanding is that identity cannot be “provided” - those words simply don’t make sense together. Unless if we’re talking about impersonation and skip the “credentials” for brevity, and then it’s not our identity but someone else’s (even if created specially for us). Of course, I could be wrong.
The neat thing is that if government provides identity, you don't have to use it for any system you build. But I'm curious how you would deal with spam and Sybils?
That’s not generally true, even if it may sound true in some specific location and time. Governments trying to mandate national authentication services is a very real thing.
As for your question: sadly, I don’t have a solution for either. I wish I would. I think ML-based approaches seem to show good promise for spam detection, though? I haven’t looked under the hood any recently, but purely anecdotally, almost every time I upgrade my mail system and antispam has something new ML-based, I’m getting a lot less junk. As for the sybils… I don’t think it’s an issue per se - an ability to have alter egos is not a clear negative. And then it must depends on the exact context. Government elections is one thing, online content popularity measurement is entirely different. Not sure it’s meaningful to envision any universal solutions - they tend to have too many side effects, and usually of undesirable nature.
They (like any other entity) can attest, but such attestation should hold as few of any special value as possible.