> everyone real would have something like a Linked In page, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or better, their own website with stuff that could be used to ensure they're a real person
Have you seen the campaigns people have run building fake LinkedIn profiles and slowly adding “connections”? There was one a few years ago which roped in a lot infosec people who should have known better and it’s gotten much worse with AI generators. Even before LLMs what you described would have been a godsend for intelligence agencies - who has more time for it, an open source developer writing actual code or the dedicated social media team at the IRA? – and now that’s increasingly worse.
I believe the solution to identity on the Internet needs to be tied to governments, that's unfortunate but in real life, that's always been the case and I can see no alternative here. Blockchain is a pipedream and no serious work is going to associate a person's identity to a key which cannot be revoked, cannot be recovered in case of "loss", can be tracked on a public ledger etc. etc...
But there's actual good work going on in the identity industry, like Verifiable Credentials, so this will become a reality soon: you will be able to verify someone's identity as long as you trust the issuer of their "credential" (which in the case here would mean basically a username and a public key or reference to a JWKS which can be used to verify the signature of the person, very much like the digital version of an identity card which can be used to check the signature on some piece of paper, but actually cyptographically safe)... so you would need to add a few governments to your list of "approved issuers", or something more indirect like universities (which themselves would rely on the government-issued identity) or traffic authorities (if you rely on driving licenses). Sure, Governments can lie, and people go to great lengths to steal others' identities in real life, but in the current world, we're still able to get bank accounts, passports etc. based on this model... just because the system is not perfect doesnt' mean it's not good enough, specially when there's no better alternative at all.
Have you seen the campaigns people have run building fake LinkedIn profiles and slowly adding “connections”? There was one a few years ago which roped in a lot infosec people who should have known better and it’s gotten much worse with AI generators. Even before LLMs what you described would have been a godsend for intelligence agencies - who has more time for it, an open source developer writing actual code or the dedicated social media team at the IRA? – and now that’s increasingly worse.