This is like your hammer breaking and you deciding you need to build a new nail.<p>If you need "legal" identification, it has to come from your government or be approved by them. Whether it's a "digital" or paper identity, it still has to be processed by your government. If they're already not doing it, they're not going to do it in a new form, either.<p>Aside from this ID is the idea of digital currency. <i>That</i> could actually be beneficial to remote people using basic cell phones. But it doesn't need any fancy digital ID; just tie the phone identifier to some intermediate personal banking network, and you can send and receive money using just your phone number. Simple, direct, intuitive, using existing infrastructure. I don't think biometrics should be necessary (it's easily broken and costs more money).
Maybe it would be better to divide this paper into two, one dealing with just the technological aspect and the other dealing the the political and economic implications.<p>Also, are you sure this technology would be decentralizing things? Maybe the technology itself would be decentralized but in a world where everyone has an electronic id, I can foresee an internet requiring said id for everything, just like what happens with government issued ids. In turn this would mean that persons would be much more easily tracked across their daily lives. Does not sound very appealing to me.<p>As for the whole legal empowering side, these sort of initiatives have backfired before so I'm sceptical. For example, once this is in place, wouldn't it make people more vulnerable to being forced to reveal their identities?
I think this should be the standard for identification and signature. Pen and paper signatures are not very reliable and are inefficient none-the-less.<p>We can put these keys on cards or phones and have them distributed across services and state boundaries.<p>Seems far more reliable to me. And verifiable!