For example, a passport, a death certificate, and so on. Will they be issued, and if so, by which organization, and if not, what will replace them?

анонимный вопрос

Probably, if an IT specialist were to tell the history of mankind, the whole thing would boil down to who issued certificates to whom and how…

Any communications in a more or less complex society inevitably run into the problem of trust. Information is transferred from node to node via unsecured channels using an unknown number of intermediaries. Natasha Rostova, tripping while stepping out of a carriage, turns into Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol sitting on a branch after a chain of retellings. Lieutenant Kizhe appears out of nowhere. Orwell writes from Spain about how war reports are composed without any link to real events. Chinese generals use the corpses of their own peasants for reporting purposes because it is easier than winning battles against a real enemy. Russian FSB agents repeat the feats of Chinese generals. And all of this is called the Byzantine Generals’ Problem—which, as is not hard to guess, tells us that the Eastern Roman Empire also had some difficulties with data reliability.

The state solves the Byzantine Generals’ Problem by creating cross-verification procedures, duplicating communication channels, and similar measures. Nevertheless, we frequently encounter episodes where a migrant in the EU had fourteen identity documents and received benefits for each, or conversely, a Russian pensioner spent several months proving to the state that he had not died, as written in the documents, and was still entitled to his pension, or Petrov and Boshirov turn out to be Chepiga and Mishkin.

Fortunately, all the technical means to solve this problem under ancap are already available. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto described a mechanism for solving the Byzantine Generals’ Problem through blockchain. A distributed public ledger stores unfalsifiable and indelible records thanks to the greed of miners and the suspicion of network node owners. And even earlier, asymmetric encryption made it possible to solve the specific problem of abandoning trusted intermediaries in data transmission, and now we communicate in secret chats, knowing that even Durov does not have the encryption keys, let alone Comrade Major.

With a competent approach, it is possible to ensure almost complete certainty that digital data will be preserved without distortion and will fall only into the hands of those to whom it is intended, while for everyone else, it will be nothing more than information junk. The trusted intermediary problem arises only at the stage of digitization. Yes, we can be sure that a document is certified by Alice’s signature, but we have no idea whether the signature has been compromised, whether Alice was under duress, and what kickback she received for her signature. So the problem of offline reputation will not go away even under ancap, but at least you will always know for sure that if Alice has certified a document with her signature, you can trust the document to the same extent that you trust Alice in general—both her competence and her ability not to fuck up her private key.

Perhaps the most well-known example of implementing passports and other documents associated by statists with the state, but without the state, is bitnation. States that look benevolently toward minarchism, such as Estonia, are already cooperating with the project, but any private company could do this with equal success.