this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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Arguably you could use some digital ID like the EU, that identifies you as a human but not which human, using fancy cryptography. With worldwide rollout this would give you all 3
If anonymous and available to everyone, what would prevent people from acquiring an ID and passing it on to a bot, or from acquiring multiples?
That's probably why the EU is doing the remote attestation thing. You can have software freedom but with bots or you can have no bots but with software bondage.
The government would keep track of whether or not they issued you an ID, so that you can't acquire multiple. You'll probably be responsible for not losing it, or maybe there's ways to revoke lost ones without compromising the privacy of it.
As for humans passing their token to a bot, that's not really solvable by any system. There is always a possibility that a human is just talking to a bot and then typing out the post themselves. But the human is still the one with the authority, and chooses to delegate to the bot.
Indeed. Which is (part of) why I wrote, "pick two".
Which is what we already have today.
Your original "pick two" comment implies that you can pick "anonymous" + "free of bots", or "available to everybody" + "free of bots". I can't think of any system that would satisfy those.
What we have today is only "available to everybody". The token/ID system adds anonymity
Rate-limiting ID acquiring and having them to be short-lived deals with malicious parties. Having for example a token that proofs that you're a legitimate person for 1 day, but your identity is tied to it for the duration means that you can only abuse the system only so for so long. For longer periods e.g. a month, half a year, you can provide pseudoanonymity, and it poses bigger issues with privacy, but a person who is willing to be subjected to be identified for a certain period of time gains certain privileges.
Sounds very dystopian though, but not having ID won't stop the tech giants from profiling you anyways.
This doesn't disprove what I wrote, as it's not anonymous.
Pseudoanonymity is not anonymity, regardless of how any given person chooses to define that nebulous term.
My "pick two" stands.
Then it's not anonymous.
Hence the pseudoanonymity.