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2 days agoWe stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes unless you dox yourself to shady gas stations and stores.
Both of which famously keep databases of everyone’s IDs, and require transmitting your ID over who-knows-what network to who-knows-where.
Oh, wait, no they don’t.
Again, if done correctly, it can be done privately and securely. I am not advocating that we give our ID to every sketchy internet site. I am advocating for a widespread secure and standardized solution.
Right, and such a solution will ultimately just require everyone to trust the fact that it’s been “done privately and securely”
I wasn’t ignoring your had-wavy “ZK proofs will solve this”; I’m saying that you still have to trust the fact that whatever magical ZK system you have has been implemented correctly and doesn’t leak any information at any point (either on purpose or accidentally).
Unless you’re one of the ~hundreds of people who actually understand the mathematics behind ZK proofs, you won’t be able to do that, and you’ll just have to trust whoever’s in charge of the system when they say “trust me it works” – especially if it’s not 100% open source. Even if it was open source, you’d still have to trust the fact that what was deployed is actually what was published.