Something like a cert chain, but it would need to be both simple to use and secure. Those two requirements are greatly at odds with each other.

Yeah one reason I think the government has to offer this is usability. While you can imagine a purely p2p protocol between cypherpunks, for everyone else there needs to be a way to social workers, DMV staff, etc can deal with edge cases (such as your id being stolen and needing a reset). Furthermore it helps if it's super illegal to tamper with this network (consider how rare check fraud is, despite being easy).

Check fraud is easy to commit but not easy to get away with while also benefiting financially.

It's also illegal to steal things but that happens much more frequently because it's often fairly easy to get away with.

Yes that's the idea, once you have the soul-bound eID the ZK part is trivial, but the eID with the guarantees I outlined is not at all trivial.

EFF has a good write-up about zero-knowledge: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-...

> What ZKPs don’t do is mitigate verifier abuse or limit their requests, such as over-asking for information they don’t need or limiting the number of times they request your age over time. They don’t prevent websites or applications from collecting other kinds of observable personally identifiable information like your IP address or other device information while interacting with them.

Interesting. While that is true I don't see how it's an argument against. Over-asking + ZKP certainly seems superior to over-asking + without ZKP. Without ZKP in a world where you constantly need to identify yourself you have absolutely no privacy.

And going forward I think that any communication without establishing some kind of trust boundary will just be noise.

The arguments they make is a good example of "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

If we allow incumbents to make photo age verification and upload of ID to third-parties to be the solution, we will have a much worse solution.

Exactly. And I do think that a world where zkp ids are taken for granted is one where the issues they point to will be more surmountable than today.