> account bootstrap

Why does account bootstrap require any identification? It's a new account with nothing in it. You can't be reading someone else's messages or withdrawing their money because there isn't any. If you're the one opening the account, that's your account, regardless of who you are.

The only reason anybody cares about this even for banks is that it's required by law. But then you show them your government ID one time when you open your account, which doesn't have to be done over the internet, and if you care about the security of it then it couldn't be. Otherwise you can't prove that the presenter of the ID is the person whose name is on the ID. And if you don't care about that (e.g. because to prevent this you're relying on the legal system deterring that with criminal penalties) you can let them provide their name without any ID.

I mean let's ask the question this way: If people have their government ID on their phone and then someday there is a wormable remote root exploit in one of the major phone platforms, a criminal organization now has access to millions of IDs. Not possible when government ID is a physical thing in your wallet. Are we just setting ourselves up for doom? They can steal everyone's money and pin their crimes on whoever they want? Why would you build such an epic single point of failure?

> recovery

It doesn't really do that. It just pushes it one level away as if that system can do something different.

What do you do if you lose your bank card? You show them your driver's license. But then what do you do if you lose your driver's license? Regardless of what that is, couldn't you just do that if you lost your bank card? It's not providing anything but another level of indirection. And in either event it's not something that needs to be done over the internet because it's needed so rarely. You don't event want it to happen over the internet, because then someone who can steal or forge a digital ID can steal your bank account from Russia instead of having to walk into a physical branch in the victim's country and put their face on a surveillance camera.

> verifying that a real human and not a bot owns the account

I still don't understand how this is supposed to prove anything. The human who operates the bot will have an ID for the bot to use.

> that the real human is unique and isn't lying about their name

This is the biggest reason to burn any such system to the ground. Because it only works against honest people. You prohibit victims of government abuse and anyone who doesn't want to be tracked from using a pseudonym, meanwhile serious criminals get IDs by remotely hacking phones or servers or bribing low-level government employees.

Preventing innocent people from being anonymous is an offensive goal.

> Banks won’t trust a bank card when you tell them you lost your bank card and need a new one

So then you call them or sign in to the account on their website and have them mail it to the address they have on file, which they'll notify the account holder of by sending text and email.

> We root trust in essentially the digital analog of your postal address.

As opposed to the traditional system, which does the same thing with your actual postal address? The government does the same thing as the bank if you lose your driver's license. They mail you another one. In many cases they mail you the first one.

> Everything you mention about stable IDs existing, corporations abusing the relationship with their users for extra profit, etc., is already a problem today. All a service needs is name and DoB and they can sell info about how you use their service to aggregators for days.

Which is exactly why you should never have to give them that information, and any system that prevents you from making it up is to be destroyed.

> And it makes services that do justifiably need stable IDs

There are so few things that legitimately need this that keeping them clunky and arduous is a huge feature, to keep the demand for it from spreading to services that don't.

> There is no reason we can’t show the user a page that explains exactly what data will be shared with a service when they present any given credential and allow them, not you, to make the choice of whether that’s okey and warranted for the given service.

And then all the services that want to track you demand your full name and DOB, use it to track you, and you have to use them anyway because they have a network effect or some other market power, or there are only three companies in the industry and they all do it.

> you’re moving the goalposts and arguing that a system that improves our ability to issue, hold, and consume digital versions of a government issued ID is wholesale bad because it doesn’t solve all conceivable problems in the digital ID space even though it solves many

It not only doesn't solve all problems, it only solves one problem -- how to track people who don't want to be tracked, which is a problem that could quite beneficially carry on not being solved -- and in the process it creates multiple new problems that didn't previously exist.

> your resounding reason for the badness is that “it will be designed poorly and used by bad guys” which is just our slippery slope du jour.

It's the thing that will happen, because designing such a thing with effective privacy protections is actually an extremely difficult problem even when you're competent and have good motives, but you're asking the political system do to it, which is the thing with a poor track record on technical competence and corrupted by all of the interests who don't want that problem to be solved because they want to track everyone.