I would love to see government IDs be available as a form of auth on the internet. It would open up the possibility of real-person communities with fewer bots and trolls.

Similarly with digital payments, I'd much rather trust the government with that than some rando cryptobro of the week.

There is nothing extreme about this. The government already does both functions in the analog world. It's about time they caught up digitally.

Meanwhile some YouTuber screeching about some Bible quote... not a convincing start

I agree I'm more concerned about Silicon valley tech bros than my own government.

I can vote for Parliament I can't vote for PayPal's board of directors.

Governments are far harder to remove than tech firms. You may be able to ditch Google, but there's only one government in your country. And "democracy" doesn't prevent state surveillance.

Most politicians back it, so voting differently makes little difference. Labour and the Conservatives support the Online Safety Bill, the Patriot Act was bipartisan, and voters have very little control over the EU and can’t stop Chat Control. And most of “government” isn’t directly elected: you can’t vote out the NSA, and Congress has little power over them either. The government blunts corporate abuses but doesn’t stop them: revolving doors ensure authorities target small fry while big companies like Visa keep going unimpeded. And finally, most voters don’t mind surveillance that much, since government and media manufacture consent for it. Don’t count on ordinary people to “vote it out” until it’s too late.

Lobbying against government surveillance helps marginally, but it's an eternal struggle. Governments take as much power as they can get, while abuses are exponentially harder to detect and stop than refusing to grant that power in the first place. The “slippery slope” isn’t a fallacy, it’s the record of the last twenty years. Don’t let them track speech and money with a central ID and digital currency, just because you don’t like a few tech bros or online trolls.

> Governments are far harder to remove than tech firms. You may be able to ditch Google

Ditching Google is not the same thing as removing Google from governance of your life, though. I don't use Google search, but I am sure they know who I am and sell that data to anyone who wants it, including government agencies which can't legally obtain that data on their own due (ostensibly) to citizen oversight.

Realistically, the average person has exactly 0 chance of "removing" either a government or a big multinational company.

However, the average person at least has some teeny tiny say in government via democratic processes and oversights. They have zero power against a big company unless they are a major shareholder.

The fundamental difference of "one person, one vote" and "one dollar, one vote" should not be lost in this discussion.

Big bureaucracies are terribly disempowering no matter who runs them, but in government at least you have some tiny amount of representation vs zero in the private sector.

PayPal doesn’t have a military and doesn’t extract taxes from you though.

The military? When was the last time they turned on the citizens? I don't live in Tiananmen, thankfully. Meanwhile it's private companies that oppress most of us: private hospitals, private prisons, private insurances companies, private credit bureaus, private banks, private tech companies, private surveillance companies, private small arms manufacturers and dealers. It ain't the government that's crimping my freedoms.

Taxes? So I get some roads and schools and parks and old people healthcare, and lose some to corruption. Better that than making Bezos and Zucky even richer.

I prefer to use my deep pockets to lobby for tax loopholes. Easy to do, when the tax code is so convoluted 80,000 bureaucrats can't keep track

> The military? When was the last time they turned on the citizens?

1970, though I hope we aren't at risk of that happening again anytime soon. The modern military has been pretty good at staying apolitical.

I mean, for all intents and purposes, the US Postal Service subsidizes Bezos.

Forget the military, when was the last time the government used force on its own citizens? Probably 1 second ago, and thousands of times a day. Are you really more oppressed by a private hospital today than you are by literally thousands of laws that have penalties that will put you in prison? I'm not pro private hospital, or anti-law, but let's be real about who has ultimate control of your freedom. Even if we grant the threat to your freedom by a private [fill in the blank], that entity only is allowed to exist by dint of the government. Not a coincidence that many of your examples are the most regulated industries, or directly in business with Government (hospitals, firearms manufactures, prisons, insurance companies).

If the question is "are you really more oppressed by the private sector than the government"... then the answer for me is, 100% yes. Healthcare is a big one (the insurance industry, along with Republicans, not wanting single-payer). Tax filing is another one (damn you, Intuit). Hospital pricing opacity another one (until recently).

Meanwhile the government protects many of my "freedoms" from private intrusions when it comes to things like bankruptcy protections, credit bureau limitations, telemarketing, angry gunowners, etc.

I've run into trouble with the law on a few occasions, but it was never terribly oppressive -- probably largely thanks to my race, class, and politics. If I were a poor Black man or a conservative white man, I'd probably have a very different view of government.

Thinking about it some more, I think think this just circles back to the old "freedom from" and "freedom to" debate... not sure that's worth getting too much into here, since we're unlikely to change anyone's minds or reveal new perspectives.

> the government used force on its own citizens

The government is authorized by it's own citizens to use force on some citizens (such as criminals).

That being said, your point might have been when did the government last use force in an unjust manner? That's a matter of constant political debate.

PayPal might not but Apple/etc extract a 30% tax from everything you do through their stores.

Agreed. But I can choose not to use it. I don’t buy things in the App Store nor do I use pay pal.

If your government's military wanted to oppress you, PayPal wouldn't protect you from the consequences. No payment system ever conceived by even the stanchest technoanarchist is immune to bullets.

It's a bit ironic... all this talk about crypto evading government hasn't really changed much. Then you have multinationals like Meta and Apple that really do have more money and power than most governments because of their centralization and scale.

The idea that the USD you earn in a wage is "yours" and the government has no right to tax it makes no sense to me. They printed the money. Your wage wouldn't exist without the government making the modern economy possible (in more ways than just printing it). Many of our jobs wouldn't even exist without the government's participation in the economy.

Holy strawman Batman.

My concern with digital payments is the elimination of cash. Having the ability to transfer value without it being monitored or blocked is an exceptionally useful property of paper money.

But you might buy things the government doesn’t want you to have. Real meat? Nope. Religious texts? Nope.

Which government is that? Even Russia values religious faith as a pillar for misinformation.

China, notably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_China#Anti-metaphy...

While not an outright ban on religion per se, there is continued state pressure against religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antireligious_campaigns_of_the...

Or participate in activities the government doesn’t want you to participate in. Canadian trucker protest? Nope.

As long as the US continues to have large numbers of unbanked/underbanked, that isn't a possibility.

Well, it's still possible with barter goods, just a lot harder. Isn't there a cryptocurrency that's actually private too? (I know Bitcoin is not)

Monero. It's not perfect of course.

I don't trust the govt quite as much as you, but could see this being a useful govt function if the issuing body didn't maintain any record of when, where, or why an ID was used--and only acted to verify the authenticity of an ID.

I don't know if it's really a matter of "trusting" the government, but of accepting that they already have access to most of my data anyway. Between credit cards, IP logs, subpoenas, national security letters, warrantless wiretapping, etc., they already know everything there is to know about me.

What makes this tradeoff (of convenience vs privacy) acceptable to me is not that I trust the government, but that I already accept I have near-zero privacy right now, as it is. Making it slightly easier for them isn't a big deal. I'm not a very exciting person to begin with.

And frankly I suspect that outside of techno-libertarian echo chambers, this is the case for most regular people. They just don't really care if the government knows about them. Not everyone has the same degree of desire/need for privacy.

I also fit into that camp of un-interesting people you're describing, but I'd say the intersections between privacy and law are a bit more underhanded and dangerous than the intersections between privacy and corporations.

In legal circles, for example, there's the refrain that you should never share unnecessary information with police, even if you're well intentioned and have nothing to hide, because innocence isn't a preclusion from being royally fucked in court. It's true that "the government" as a homogenous blob has mountains of information on you, but I guess I'm not so eager to dissolve what few helpful divisions within that blob exist.

On the whole though I agree that my information existing somewhere in that blob isn't the hugest deal.

> I would love to see government IDs be available as a form of auth on the internet

This kind of already exists: https://login.gov

I have to use this to login to the VA.

It'd certainly be interesting if they opened it up so third-parties could use it for authentication.

Oh, please no, unless those third parties used it as an option for authentication rather than the only means of authentication.

Totally this. I should've made that explicit in my post. Thanks for pointing it out.

It’s not even been 100 years and people already forgot.

US history isn't my forte. Can you elaborate?

He's talking about those yellow stars Jews had to wear in Nazi Germany. Please tell me you at least remember what happened after that.

> I would love to see government IDs be available as a form of auth on the internet. It would open up the possibility of real-person communities with fewer bots and trolls.

And reintroduce all the chilling effects of knowing everything you say is on a permanent record linked to your name. I know the government wouldn't be running the sites, but they'd have activity metadata, and data breaches could be correlated to work out who the "opaque" ID refers to (perhaps it would be possible to mitigate that by having the IdP identify users to the site as a hash combining the site and the user. Not sure). There are a few types of companies that may have a genuine reason for requiring government auth, but generally we should not make it easy for Facebook or Google to require it

A community with fewer bots and trolls should be accomplished with moderation, and not just allowing a firehose of signups

Can't we have both?

Ideally, the government login/auth would be an opt-in for sites where anonymity isn't important. Facebook, for example, already has a real-name policy but still has fake accounts. Moderation alone isn't sufficient; it's hard to keep up with the number of bad actors. Limiting signups to verified humans, and possibly validating their nationality, can help with that IRT to bots and foreign agents.

It's important that the mechanism be opt-in, though, and yeah, metadata would be a problem. But realistically it's just a matter of degree... they already have access to all of that metadata today with just a subpoena or national security letter. Centralizing the login would make it easier for them to collect it, but also make it easier to audit via government mechanisms (FOIAs, etc.) compared to the opacity of private companies (which are under zero obligation to reveal how things are stored).

> It would open up the possibility of real-person communities with fewer bots and trolls.

I would be 100% unwilling to engage with public online communities if I had to reveal my real-world identity to do so.

And that's OK. I'm sure there would still be anonymous forums, the 4chans and reddits of the world and such. But this would enable real-identity communities that we don't currently have, useful for things like public comments and discussions for local news (god, those newspaper comment sections are horrible right now), government requests for comments (like when they're starting a new development or changing land use or whatever), things like a public version of Nextdoor/Yelp/etc.

The hope is not that it would kill anonymity altogether, but that it would create some alternative communities linked to real-world identities, and maybe that would help people behave better, with real-world decorum, in those specific identities. Yeah, some people would never sign up for those... and maybe that's OK, as long as the remaining community is more civil and thoughtful?

> maybe that would help people behave better, with real-world decorum, in those specific identities

I don't think that would be the result, really, because when sites do have real identity requirements, it doesn't increase civility much, if any.

I think it's the absence of a physical presence that makes people feel OK with being less civil. Emotionally, it doesn't feel like you're talking with real people.

But I don't know.

You might be right about that, sadly.

> Meanwhile some YouTuber screeching about some Bible quote

Why do you lie when it takes 1 second to verify the facts? I wasn't interested, but clicked on the video and the man is talking in a calm and collected manner, not even close to "screeching". Or is it always "screeching" when somebody says something you disagree with?

National IDs in the US are never coming because the evangelical base of the GOP literally oppose it for being the "mark of the beast".

>Here we go. CBDCs are next, and also national Digital IDs

No, this is a long term replacement for ACH, a function that the Federal Reserve was already carrying out.

We already use social security numbers for everything (insurance, credit, etc.). It's pretty much a national ID, just a shitty one.

The way they got SSNs through is by promising that it would be illegal to use them for identification. The only remnant of that is that it (still?) remains illegal to refuse services to people who refuse to give their social security numbers, although if you do it you'll break customer service.

> it (still?) remains illegal to refuse services to people who refuse to give their social security numbers

I'd love to read this, for anyone more familiar with the legislation/where to find it.

"Can I see your social security card, please? The one that says 'Not to be used for identification' on it?" lol

USG has issued national ID documents for more than 200 years. They're called passports.

Everyone who is sufficiently against national ID must never have left the United States, then? Correlation or causation, I wonder.

Between passports, SSNs, state IDs, your birthday, homeowner records, and metadata like addresses/phone numbers/employers, it's already trivially easy for any actor to fingerprint you anyway. Even the private sector does this for cheap. To say nothing of biometrics like facial recognition, which ironically, the government sometimes tries to protect you from (like in Illinois, where it's banned).

It's so weird to me that people are afraid of the government knowing who you are when like every private company asks for the same kind of information all the time, and data brokers gobble that up and resell it all the time (including to government), and nobody bats an eye.

nothing about singling out people for various reasons and depriving them of basic services? read history much?

The government already has the power to do this — just ask any trans person in the South

> The government already has the power to do this — just ask any trans person in the South

Any citations on every trans person in the South being singled out for denial of services by the government? Because that sounds like inflammatory nonsense.

It’s their truth. Don’t deny it.

Banning gender affirming care effectively is singling out transgender people and denying them services[0]. Additionally there was a recent Supreme Court decision allowing businesses to discriminate against people[1].

Additionally in living memory, many businesses and government services were segregated by race. In some cases some races were denied access to services or those services were severely underfunded. The legacy of that legal system still has impacts today.

[0]: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2023-03-30/... [1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-supreme-c...

> Banning gender affirming care effectively is singling out transgender people

For children. Or for state funding, but the state doesn't pay for the vast majority of plastic surgery.

> Additionally in living memory, many businesses and government services were segregated by race.

Race doesn't need affirming medical care, or identification to single out. Also, businesses and government services weren't abstractly segregated by race, they were specifically discriminatory toward black people.

1. The grandparent comment asked for “Any citations on every trans person in the South being singled out for denial of services by the government.” The great grandparent comment only mentions asking the opinion of a transgender person if the government has the power to deny services to them. By banning gender affirming care, even just for children, wouldn’t that be an example of government discrimination against transgender people?

2. The example of racial segregation was to point out an additional time that a minority group was discriminated against. Black people getting less than adequate medical treatment is not them needing specific affirmative care and being denied it but an example of discrimination that was government sanctioned. Beyond pointing to the two sets of laws and their discriminatory natures the link is superficial, just another example of legal discrimination.

I cannot speak for you but denying the government the power to discriminate or oppress minorities and empowering the rights of individuals to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is worthwhile to me. Which is why seeing all these states pass these discriminatory laws is disheartening.

They don't need a national id to do that. Lmao

Case in point, the no fly lists, they literally don't care if they just ban all the John Smiths.

I see it as an almost total impracticality to transition from our current system to a centralized national identity document.

There is no central database of:

* Citizenship

* Births

* Drivers Licenses

* Marriages

* Deaths (SSA death reporting is voluntary and customary by funeral homes -not required)

* Education history

* Criminal Records

* Firearm Ownership

* Property Ownership

* Vehicle Ownership

The only thing the feds or even the state government has a certain idea of is, how much you made in a given reporting period - not that reporting periods always overlap in any meaningful way. There is no requirement (as far as I can tell) to even request a social security number - most parents do, because they want to claim their children on their taxes.

Now, many of those records do exist - they exist at the county, state or local level in some manner or fashion - and of course, its not standardized either, sometimes its at the county, sometimes the state, sometimes at the county or state for the same record type based on year. (e.g. Marriages from 1902-1962 are in county records, and 1962 to current in state, or the other way around.)

Trying to link all of this data in a meaningful way, would be a monumental task that would likely require a vast amount of manual data matching - and it would still be wrong 40% of the time.

They could do an audit and census approach as a one off to get all this started. For a national ID though wouldn't you only need drivers license / property data / marriage data / criminal data / citizenship / births?

Not sure you need firearm / vehicle / education history for an ID system

It'd be a gargantuan project to do so, just trying to match property data alone would be massive.

In this case CBDCs (the interest bearing kind) actually have the potential of disintermediating banks. Or atleast reducing credit/liquidity risk. Grandma's savings/deposits arent going to evaporate the next time a bank collapses. Cause her CBDCs are going to be sitting in her wallet.

if they are interest bearing, there will always be some risk involved by definition....

> Grandma's savings/deposits arent going to evaporate the next time a bank collapses.

That's already the case.

I've already read this comment before, just written a different way. I promise you I'm not a robot, I just disagree.

US attitude towards national IDs is amusing, lol

It's also wildly inconsistent. The same political factions (vs individuals) that complain about Real ID also complain endlessly about fake ID. They complain about illegal voting, but also support the drive to withdraw their states from ERIC, which has done a good job in detecting illegal voting. Basically they're sometimes against solutions because their complaints infrastructure generates a reliable stream of political and financial capital from the credulous.

[Lightly] amusing is thinking there is a singular attitude in the US towards national IDs. And we already have several forms of national ID anyway.

Comically, the primary national ID we use is one specifically designed not to be a national ID.

The secondary "national" IDs most of us use are simply state IDs or driver's licenses. They're not in a federal database, but I don't understand how that's meaningfully different. It's still a big government tracking system.

It was, but curiously, they've removed the related verbiage from new issuances.

They used to carry a disclaimer: FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES • NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION

Well yeah, generalisation is awful, but it has it gist here :-)

It was obvious from the first line that your post was going to be axe-grindey conspiracy fodder. It's not us, it's you and your and tightly closed epistemological loops.

> CBDCs are next

Nobody has seriously discussed a CBDC for months in the U.S. FedNow is the American financial system catching up to the 1990s. It has nothing to do with crypto beyond the cursory.

Powell seriously discussed CBDC in his recent testimony to congress. He mentioned it was far off.

> Powell seriously discussed CBDC in his recent testimony to congress. He mentioned it was far off

It isn't being seriously discussed for implementation. The working groups are disbanded. The Fed won't write it off--they shouldn't. But CBDCs are as proximate as postal banking.

FedNow is the system that will give the USD some or all of the troublesome properties of a CBDC.

I can't begin to parse your comment.

Right now, you hold your money digitally with a bank. The bank holds its money digitally with the Fed. If your bank caught fire, the bank and its insurers would be responsible for getting you your money back.

A CBDC would mean cutting out the bank - you would hold your money digitally with the Fed, and the Fed would be liable for it.

FedNow creates a ledger that allows two banks holding their money digitally with the Fed make an instant transfer. You never become a direct customer of the Fed, but your bank and the bank of the person you're exchanging money with - both already Fed customers - have a quicker way to record the transfer.

The only relation between FedNow and a CBDC is that the Fed is involved, and, like, computers, I guess? Other than that, their mechanisms and effects have very little in common.

It's kind of strange that in other threads HNers will lament the end of the nerd internet and how everything is corporatized and 1984 wasn't a manual, and then here they downvote you.