The Lemur Threshold

With Latex Exam Gloves and Digital Identity, the Head Lemur takes an increasingly familiar problem, Digital Identity is getting way too complicated, and simplifies it, which he does with this plain (to borrow the arcana of IdentoLatin (see the pull-down menu defaulted to TechnoLatin) assertion:

Digital Identity is about sitting at a computer and swapping Money for Stuff from the comfort of your chair. Before the DI folks go crazy about how much more it is, credit scores, employment information, and yes even Medical Information, is reduceable into Money for Stuff.

Money for Stuff is the Prime Number of Digital Identity, it does not reduce any further than that.

He continues,

Whatever Digital Identity scheme gets adopted it must have two cardinal points.

It must be portable.
Think USB Drive with a fingerprint scanner. This is my choice as it can be configured to work through your's or mine or the grocery stores computers. See the crash problem for the largest single reason you do not want your digital identity on your personal computer.
It must be recoverable.
Katrina is teaching us this lesson on a scale that is truly massive.

This implies a distributed network of Trusted Third Parties that can act as a repository for recovery. This may be an area that Kim Cameron, Eric Norlin, Dick Hardt, and the P2P folks need to sit down and figure out some sort of mechanism to anonymously store this information such as the internet stores addresses on the 12 internet root servers. Hoepfully it won't be as complicated as the diagram above.

How far is this from the concept of identity brokerage posed by the i-Names system?

I've found that concept pretty agreeable, even if the back end of it seemed a little complex.

I also think what the Head Lemur's talking about isn't far from what I call independent identity

Finally (but not really, since we'll talk about this forever), I believe we need a Net-based context that embraces all identity systems, much as gravity and Earth embrace everything built on it, including every silo and walled garden. That's what I also believe Kim Cameron is pushing for with the Identity Metasystem.

Meanwhile, we'll all keep talking past each other if we don't simplify this stuff down a bit. None of this will work if it doesn't make sense to techies like the Head Lemur, much less to the civilians whose lack of adoption will render all our public thinking on the matter pointless.