This the part which I believe would be extremely difficult to do by mandate given the current US social and political climate, which is why I think there needs to be some form of market incentive for these private actors.
> I also don’t think there necessarily needs to be an incentive for businesses to invest in expensive card reader systems that phone home to a database and authenticate the QR displayed on the device.
Thankfully nothing needs to phone home anyway, and there is no accessible database. It's all PKI based - the device attests certain facts and the reader verifies these attestations. A reasonably effective system which (for example) corner liquor store owners are going to want needs to exist to perform validation, though.
> Instead, just change the law against selling liquor to kids saying that a good faith effort to validate the authenticity of state issued digital ID is a defense to prosecution under that law. In my state, at least, this is basically how it works now with physical ID cards.
This would be the kind of incentive that I think would help a lot - if! a "good faith" effort to verify a digital ID were easier than a physical one. If using the digital system helps protect liquor vendors from liability and/or police sting operations, that's a huge incentive to use the system.
As to step 2, agreed - obviously we’re currently living in a world where stuff that seemed well within government’s remit since the ‘30s or so is now randomly determined to be extra constitutional. Who knew! But yes, that needs to be part of the system design.
That said, I still think this is fairly “easy” politically (weird court decisions notwithstanding) because there’s already an existing ID regime in place, and no one is saying that’s not a valid government function (yet). If a state wants to say that anyone can rely on a valid digital ID as proof of identity, that’s fundamentally permissive - if a private entity wants to hold itself to a higher standard, and require that every customer submit fingerprints and a birth certificate, it certainly can - good luck with that. But give everyone else the ability to reasonably rely on a standards-compliant identity app, and I think there will be a lot of voluntary uptake there.
Sounds like we’re probably in violent agreement - a system that makes sense for its users is probably going to be well received. States can lead the way by taking the pretty short step from physical IDs to digital IDs that are really not inferior in any way to the existing regime and potentially quite a bit more secure and convenient.
This the part which I believe would be extremely difficult to do by mandate given the current US social and political climate, which is why I think there needs to be some form of market incentive for these private actors.
> I also don’t think there necessarily needs to be an incentive for businesses to invest in expensive card reader systems that phone home to a database and authenticate the QR displayed on the device.
Thankfully nothing needs to phone home anyway, and there is no accessible database. It's all PKI based - the device attests certain facts and the reader verifies these attestations. A reasonably effective system which (for example) corner liquor store owners are going to want needs to exist to perform validation, though.
> Instead, just change the law against selling liquor to kids saying that a good faith effort to validate the authenticity of state issued digital ID is a defense to prosecution under that law. In my state, at least, this is basically how it works now with physical ID cards.
This would be the kind of incentive that I think would help a lot - if! a "good faith" effort to verify a digital ID were easier than a physical one. If using the digital system helps protect liquor vendors from liability and/or police sting operations, that's a huge incentive to use the system.