Identity is a philosophical problem and a relationship, and so far we've managed to kick the can down the road of what an identity might mean outside the nation state, but the internet may prove to be a bit of a forcing function in deciding some of these questions we had the luck to avoid. I've been doubtful of digital identity startups because most of them are just substituting an opaque problem in crytography for the capital-H hard problem in political philosophy, which originates in prehistorical problems in collecting a census.

Maybe OAuth with some OIDC extensions and attributes solves everything, and FIDO has solved it, but if there were a way to bet against that, personally I'd go all in.

I'm not talking about "identity" as in "being somebody".

I'm talking about identity as in identification, documents, and so on -- which is what we were discussing (as in "identity provider" in software terms).