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There is no such thing as identity theft protection. Its all snake oil.

There are a couple of vendors out there who at least try to detect SIM swapping and traffic hijacking. It's better than nothing and eliminates the simplest attacks, but still has it flaws, including happy path case support (like only working on the network and needing a smart phone).

All methods eventually have a flaw. The goal is to reduce the attack surface and increase the complexity of the attack, no to elemininate all vectors.

Then use their client. Its a free service, what are you complaining about.

Blockchain as "major upcoming"? Like after all these startups have not managed to produce any substantial success stories and there are no real validations of a technological fit besides crypto-currency? Where IBM is desperate as hell in selling their blockchain crap to corporations and isnt really seeing success? Yeah, don't think the blockchain revolution you are waiting for is happening any time soon, if ever. ML and AI are sadly also more of a buzzword right now outside of a couple or large players, but at least its applicable in different areas.

More buzzwords.

Sounds like a case of not handling the UX of the feature properly. What you can do is either allow them to unlock the account via email, or have a time-based unlock, or both. We do 72 hours or unlock it via email.

Dont think thats really a thing outside of US (another thing the US is like awkwardly behind in).

Most trackers have a way to handle non-JS clients by rendering a tracking pixel - a solution that has been out there for a long time now.

This is the problem - these blockchain ideologists only tend to see problems and solutions from the perspective of the actual cryptocurrency blockchains. Real world is sadly a little different...

Please do list a couple of useful solutions where blockchain is the right/better tool for the jobs and thats outside of crypto coins or secondary layer of payment abstraction (and even there any payment option could work better in a lot of the cases).

Coming from a former Soviet state, we did not have disposable diapers when me and my siblings were growing up. Washable diapers were the only option, and it was horrible. Both for the kids as well as the parents having to wash them all the time.

Im actually amazed that there are people today who think this is a good idea and want to go back to it. Seriously what?

In my experience for whatever reason a lot of software engineers consider normal functional communication with their peers and managers as ass kissing. Is it because of being introverted?

In the end its not the crypto that makes it more secure. Estonia still has a national identifier number, just like US has the SSN. The difference is that while I can know your name, DOB and the identifier (which actually contains your DOB in it), I cant easily pretend to be you. And this is because the process itself is different - when I got to open a bank account, I present my ID card, the bank can plug it in and pull up my profile from the central authority (ran by the government), and I need to pass the checks of being there in person, with a matching ID, which also checks out from the central system (including picture).

Combine this with for example strong proof via blockchain about who used to check your info and from where, and you are at a pretty good spot. Note that Estonia does not do that last part just yet.

As for the US, the chances of having a national ID card along with similar infrastructure are slim to none. So don't hold your breath about major changes any time soon. The best best would be to get closer to something like the above solution via private companies or maybe the credit bureaus themselves (once they are force to change their business model from aggregating and selling data without your consent).

E-Residency is still a solution looking for a problem, the program runners just dont want to admit it yet. Instead they sink more money into a pointless cause.

Estonia literally needs to make amendments to their constitution for this to work, yet they refuse to believe it yet. They also need to create actual incentives for people to create their company in Estonia (labour related taxes as pretty high there), as well as work out all the remote banking related issues (banks not wanting to open accounts unless you show up in-person).

A bad a excuse for a bad library. See this time and time again in NodeJS though.

And even after pushing out chip reader terminals and cards with chips, banks in the US refuse to institute mandatory PIN code entry on all payments with the chip - as its everywhere in Europe. So nothing really changed.

You open the account in person, by showing them your ID card. The bank has access to the central national database of IDs, so they can compare if the ID card shown by the person matches the information coming from the central db, matching the person showing it on the picture. Hence you have strong in-person proofing, that is now the basis for the 2FA.

Thats how it should be done, except in the US there is no way to check against a national database of IDs, not even on the state level with DMVs. You literally trust the plastic card the person shows you and thats where the problems start. Online its even worse.

There are legitimate use cases where collecting and storing (in some manner at least) is necessary. You cannot just stop companies from collecting information, and furthermore stop them from storing any of it. Thats just naive.

Funny. Software engineers complaining that someone talking about politics is as rich as the politicians. But you talking about politics on behalf of people who are way worse off than you is somehow different. Its not like engineers are the poorest workers...

A link to Github issues and a GH page with zero screenshots. Thats not how to promote your OS project :(

Since when does Amazon have their own delivery people? Sure you are not talking about a USPS/UPS worker here.

And yet where I live I get packages left at my door for days, noone is touching them, there are no bullet proof vending machines and people generally are well behaved and courteous.

This just to remind you that the US is huge, consists of 50 states and in most cases the states are very different from each others.

I'm not even an american and I'm offended about the generalization.

I think you forgot the /s

You say that as if they would be punished for that. And its not like they do this all the time...

The scenarios you described sound like straight from "The Innovators Dilemma". Except the companies thinking this way were disrupted out of business.

Dont think these companies want to hire people who freak out over meaningless things like this...

And I think people who make these kinds of ridiculous blanket statements are a joke.

People who claim BTC is the next mainstream currency are delusional. Its an investment commodity right now, and its way too volatile, way too little regulated and capped too low to be a serious currency contender. Seriously, the real world does not work that way, and thats not necessarily a bad thing. This goes especially for the whole decentralized and uncontrolled/unregulated part - I see it as bad thing, a lot of the regulations are in place to avoid anarchy and protect the consumers (admittedly there are also regulations that totally screw the consumer in some cases).

So why use blockchain? Whats the benefit? The only thing I can think of is proof of authentication attempts, a kind of a irrefutable log of some sort. But whats the benefit its providing, that we are lacking today?