I have thought about this a fair bit but not come to any solid conclusions. I think the Bitcoin network/blockchain is the perfect tool for the job allowing people to use their public key as their identity, as it is with nostr. this is for online use only, i don't see any need to doxx oneself as part of this solution.

I could see a world where people develop their reputation online using their public key as their identity. if someone posts something the world will be able to ascertain if it was truly posted by the person with the reputation or someone else pretending to be that person. in a world where deep fakes are commoditized I could see that being a use case, the importance of the bitcoin network being the source of truth is of course that it is owned by no one and can be used and trusted by anyone, as opposed to a centralized system being the arbiter of who is who.

Of course this goes against those who want to keep the bitcoin network focused on transactions rather than secondary use cases, I won't dig into that as I am not informed enough on the topic to have an opinion.

Of course the big issue here is a key pair is a tricky thing for the majority of people to manage, and while Fostr exists I have to wonder how realistic an pseudonymous identity service not run by a govt is, people are so uninformed I can't help but that that by the time a solution was robust enough for mass use and at the same time people understood their need for it, the govts of the world will have this shit even more locked down than they already do.

@freetx I have never heard of ION and very surprised to see such a thing under the MS banner, thanks for bringing it up!

and of course thanks OP for bringing up spaces, i will look at that too. For anyone else curious: https://docs.spacesprotocol.org/