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I would flip it and say that the Government only maintains the public key registry, and you alone keep your private key. You can extend that kind of scheme by signing "birth certificates" of your children using your private key to prove familial relationships. The hard part is dealing with key revocation in the event someone steals your private key. And of course overcoming the ambient distrust of government some people have.

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Or losing the private key or forgetting the password. I have public keys that are older than a lot of HN commenters that I have not been able to use for almost two decades, I can't imagine how fun it would be do design a system where your private key is integral to your civic rights.

Build a system that can handle public keys for 100K people for more than ten years and then I might think about letting you start working on a pilot system to work out the additional failure scenarios, but absolutely nothing that the tech industry has produced in the past thirty years provides me with any sense of confidence that they would not screw this up horribly (and then those same people would complain bitterly on some future HN equivalent about what a waste of money this effort was.)

Oh for sure. Thought experiments like this are often far cries from workable solutions that are robust in the real world. That's basically a summary of why viable crypto for the masses in other domains remains such an albatross.

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