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0 pointsAnthonyMouse5y ago0 comments

> Being able to handle my life hassle free online instead of going to physical places (like post office, banks, gov office) is liberating.

The US has an incoherent assemblage of spare parts for an ID system and it's been years since I've seen the inside of a physical bank.

You have bank credentials and use them with with the bank. You have post office credentials and use them with the post office. This is far better from a security and privacy standpoint that any kind of centralized ID. If someone steals your post office credentials they can't drain your brokerage account, ransomware your employer's cloud services in your name and take out a home equity loan against your house and convert it into Bitcoin.

Centralized identity is a bug, not a feature.

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2rsf5y ago

But aren't they all based on one central ID? how can the post office or bank know that you are who you claim to be without an official ID?

AnthonyMouseOP5y ago

The post office doesn't need to know "who you are" except insofar as you have a payment method that works which they can charge postage to.

The payment processor, in turn, just needs to know that you're authorized to draw on that account, which they know because you have the credentials established when it was opened.

Functionally none of this actually uses your name for anything useful. Even giving it to them at all is, at best, a password reset method, and there are a million other ways to do that which don't require a centralized ID.

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