> Can you explain when this is the case? You can always vote with your feet and not use x|y|z.com. Not a once have I been forced to used some piece of software in my personal life.

You don't want to give your real name to Facebook, but your friend group uses Facebook to communicate. Herding all the cats into using Signal doesn't work because some of them want to use Discord and some of them want to use IRC and some of them actually want to use Facebook, so you're stuck with the status quo, which is Facebook. You have no choice because the choice was made by the group before you arrived.

You don't want a record of everywhere you go being created and associated with your real name, e.g. because you're a persecuted religious minority or gay and don't want that secret being leaked when you go to services or gay bars. You can't use a car for this because the DMV requires your real name and requires you to display a license plate that gets recorded on ALPR cameras everywhere. If Uber requires your real name to use their app and the local transit authority requires your real name to buy a multipass and nobody else lets you buy transit without giving your name either, there is no "use a competitor" because there is no competitor that doesn't track you.

> I'm not actually arguing that socially we shouldn't have "Personas" or access to multiple email addresses or whatnot, etc. I'm arguing that personas should be specifically chosen by products on top of a strong cohesive underlying human identity system (by not using some global id as a primary key in the users table or even storing it in the first place, or by allowing a less strict form of authentication).

Then if you have two social media accounts meant to be separate, the social media company knows that they're both the same person, and when they get breached, so does everybody else.

> If your message board doesn't need to enforce uniqueness of humans, or enforce that posters use a real name, then it simply doesn't (maybe email is good enough for it).

But maybe it does anyway, even though it doesn't need to, because correlating identities is profitable. And because social networks have a network effect you still have to use that one to communicate with all the people you can't get to switch to one that doesn't.

> However, if your bank does need to, it has a good way to do so not a shitty one.

It's still not clear why they need one at all. You can't get a driver's license in someone else's name because attesting that they're you to the DMV is a crime. You can't get a bank account in someone else's name because attesting that they're you to the bank is a crime. What is being added by requiring the prospective criminal to do the former first and then setting up some system for the DMV to securely assert things to the bank? Just arrest them for giving a false name to the bank in the same way you would arrest them for giving a false name to the DMV.

Or stop requiring banks to demand this. KYC laws are ridiculously ineffective, and it's unreasonable that you can't easily buy things over the internet without giving your name.

> And as a user I'd rather my account recovery be rooted in a socially robust system even if higher order services don't need to chain their account/user records back to a unique person ID.

There are fundamentally two ways to do account recovery.

One is secrets. You have your email password or your secret key in your hardware security token and use it to prove that it's your account.

The other is laws. You assert that it's your account and if it's not then you go to jail. This one inherently has to be done within the jurisdiction because it's premised on seizing the liar and incarcerating them. It doesn't work if you can make the assertion from Somalia and be immune from consequences.

You can voluntarily tie these two together right now. Give the secret account recovery information to any trusted party you like that will only give it back to someone who shows up in person, asserts that they're you, and is subject to prosecution if they're not.

What you're asking for is the ability of corporations to force you to tie them together as the price of admission, even if you don't want to, which they then will any time they have enough market power that you can't avoid doing business with them. I like it better when it's voluntary -- that's not the same as take it or leave it.

> Powerful tools come with great responsibility.

This isn't a tool, it's a law.

> I actually think that a strong identity system would help us avoid slipping into a totalitarian nightmare where all the tracking happens in the dark behind the veil (essentially what we have today). I want people that need to track you to declare it loud and clear so that I can make informed trust decisions on a service by service basis.

But how does it solve that? Suppose you could still refuse to give your name in this new system. Well, you can already do that now and they'll still fingerprint your device etc. What's going to stop them then?

And if your answer is laws prohibiting device fingerprinting etc., wouldn't those laws do that without any centralized identity system? They're independent things.

> Anyway you really seem to be arguing from a position where you assume this tool will be used unilaterally by everyone for bad.

I think there are ways to solve the problems this purports to solve without creating the problems that it creates.