I’ve been thinking about how we could function as a society to use public key cryptography to verify identities. Some initial ideas I’ve had so far would be for people to go to their county/state “DMV” type office that would normally issue licenses and ID cards, and they would essentially create a key pair for you on the spot to verify that it’s actually you. Whenever you apply for a job, or do any identity verification that would require you to disclose your social security number you could basically sign a message verifying it’s you. Maybe this might mean that there would need to be some type of a country wide centralized blockchain to keep track of all the info with anyone being able to check it and verify the info. It’s a half baked idea, but considering pretty much everyone’s personal info, including SSNs, are all over the dark web being bought and sold, a key pair that gets issued by the state might be a good idea? I would love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on this, especially if the idea has been fleshed out before.