> Having a business where you can go to a physical office and show up with ID so you can get your account back would solve this problem.
I've wanted something similar, combined with a tree approach to account recovery where the effort for recovery can vary depending on the importance of the account.
Say I lose access to my McDonald's account. That's not a very important account. It just contains some reward points that would get me some discounts at McDonald's. That account would be a leaf on the recovery tree. It's parent node would be my email account, currently at Fastmail. Recovery of my McDonald's account would just require responding to a recovery email McDonald's would send to my email.
My email account is much more important. Its parent node would be my domain name, currently registered at Namecheap. Recovery of my email account at Fastmail would involve demonstrating to Fastmail that I control my email domain.
My domain name is so important, since it is in the ultimate recovery path for so many descendant nodes, it would probably have at least two parent nodes (I didn't say anything about the tree having to be a binary tree).
They would be businesses that can verify my ID in person using government documents like my passport, and provide a way for me to prove that identity to third parties.
Banks would be good candidates to run such a business. Post offices would also be good candidates.
The protocol between the root verifiers and their direct child nodes could be a zero knowledge protocol so that the child node doesn't get your real identity and the root verifier doesn't know who the child node is. All the root needs to learn is that you are being verified for some site, and all the site needs to learn is that you are the same person who set up the account.
Such a zero knowledge protocol could also be good for age verification, which more and more jurisdictions are requiring from some sites. With such a protocol between the age verifiers and the sites you could have age verification without giving up anonymous accounts.
> My domain name is so important, since it is in the ultimate recovery path for so many descendant nodes, it would probably have at least two parent nodes (I didn't say anything about the tree having to be a binary tree).
If your domain name can have multiple descendant nodes and multiple parent nodes, is that still a tree?
Probably not. I should have said directed acyclic graph.
Actually I guess it doesn't even have to acyclic. You just need a directed graph where that has a non-empty set R of nodes such that (1) nodes in R do not have incoming edges, and (2) every node that has an incoming edge can be reached by some path that starts in R.
From what I can understand from the wikipedia page for the graph theory trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory), what I'm used to calling tree ("computer science trees"?) are rooted trees, and what you described could be called a tree.
Which kind of makes sense, because a tree has stuff that branches out at the top (the branches) and at the bottom (the roots). The trunk has multiple parents and multiple children.
Definitions aside, I like your idea a lot. I feel like it's one of the few propositions that recognizes how important proving your identity already is, and how it will only become more important. The system is flexible and makes sense. It's the kind of thing that I think most people could understand, and thus use.
I've wanted something similar, combined with a tree approach to account recovery where the effort for recovery can vary depending on the importance of the account.
Say I lose access to my McDonald's account. That's not a very important account. It just contains some reward points that would get me some discounts at McDonald's. That account would be a leaf on the recovery tree. It's parent node would be my email account, currently at Fastmail. Recovery of my McDonald's account would just require responding to a recovery email McDonald's would send to my email.
My email account is much more important. Its parent node would be my domain name, currently registered at Namecheap. Recovery of my email account at Fastmail would involve demonstrating to Fastmail that I control my email domain.
My domain name is so important, since it is in the ultimate recovery path for so many descendant nodes, it would probably have at least two parent nodes (I didn't say anything about the tree having to be a binary tree).
They would be businesses that can verify my ID in person using government documents like my passport, and provide a way for me to prove that identity to third parties.
Banks would be good candidates to run such a business. Post offices would also be good candidates.
The protocol between the root verifiers and their direct child nodes could be a zero knowledge protocol so that the child node doesn't get your real identity and the root verifier doesn't know who the child node is. All the root needs to learn is that you are being verified for some site, and all the site needs to learn is that you are the same person who set up the account.
Such a zero knowledge protocol could also be good for age verification, which more and more jurisdictions are requiring from some sites. With such a protocol between the age verifiers and the sites you could have age verification without giving up anonymous accounts.