Do you think decentralized IDs are possibly a third lane some nations could adopt?

I think it's likely the US ships "self custodial" #DigitalIdentity first, which is a flow where you submit your KYC documentation, that gets manually approved by the state, and then you can prove who you are using an app that "carries" the credential during login.

Once that is derisked, the immediate question for the State becomes phasing out physical legacy identity documents and migrating that leg to biometric registration with your personal device (partnered with manufacturer sensors) but also from a very young age (maybe even starting on day of birth). Biometrics can aggregate over time to become stronger, so I could see doctors appointments and flights being used to add additional scans, the way you phone lets you add additional fingerprints and additional reads of existing biometrics. The goal for the state is knowing who is who and having a central database in order to unify the state across it's distributed and fragmented mechanisms. In the private sector, that same unification will happen but opaquely using whatever is metadata revealed by the #DigitalIdentity technology chosen, to the extent that a universal fingerprint for a give persn will be converged on in time. That's my current sense.

TLDR: a fully permissioned society based on a DigitalIdentity state seems extremely likely at the present moment, but so does a greater parallel society of freedom than ever before.

Yeah sounds about right. Any thoughts on that about it limiting ability for overreach? At least better on the data side of things.

The slipperly slope follows: once there is state login, it actually incentivizes big tech to converge on it, since they can converge on universal fingerprinting (even without direct legal identifying info) using metadata since it would provide a guarantee of a single person using a single login across properties. Once the technocratic system and the state have unified on it's view of subjects... that's where the scary stuff can happen. The covid lockdown and vaccination hysteria could have been 1000x more evil under this system, which is hard to fathom.

Essentially, a situation where the ruling class can subjugate the under class by way of herding them through checkpoints and surveilling and assigning permissions autonomously with AI. It's Beijing's social credit system but with a social justice democracy facade.

I see the technocratic win as the dominant system eventually becomes something we cannot inspect that is governed by "SI". Is that what you expect down the line too? Simply "its smarter so just do as you're told". What if the exiled built layered systems everyone could understand that perhaps magnetize the masses? Somewhere to go when they face their own crossing.

Yeah. The monopoly on force is a big lever tho. Worth remembering. People are scared of dying.

For sure. That's where the opportunity is now for building layered systems we can name.

I think the technocrats must believe they are very tough until the state brandishes it's force in a convincing way, then they remember their place. Remember Jack Ma?

The tools of sociophysics are also more open these days than ever before, once we figure out how to use them correctly. The freedom convoy in Canada used the force effectively for a few weeks.

I remember. That was an important moment for Bitcoin.