I think that the credit card corporations can handle the whole digital identity thing. What more do we need than MBNA and Visa International, CitiCard and so forth? If you use the net to buy and sell, then these are the folks who can be your intermediaries. But we’re talking about the “real” you. So if your online identity is transparent — if your name is the same online and off, then these fine companies can handle your transactions.

Anonymity requires deeper authentication. To be anonymous and participate in web commerce will require an identity broker.

Creating a new identity through the use of a pseudonym requires a different approach.

Discuss.

It’s not about the shallow nature and the greed of the second generation brass-ring boys seeking to spin straw into gold. It’s not even so much about the immutability of the straw, although that’s a big part of it. What it’s about is the commodity nature of the widgets that the brass-ring boys seek to capitalize.

In the good old days — say 1997 — there was so much unlaundered mob money floating around in Silicon Valley that no good idea could go unfunded. Since they moved the Bank of America deeper into Christian fundamentalist country and closer to the Florida operation and the off-shore banks, there hasn’t been that much money to launder.

Of course, there are only so many drop shadow logoed, productized widgets with omitted “e”s available to fund, so the decline in drug money to launder matches the decline in products seeking funds, so the burn rates remain about the ame, although the general contribution to global warming has declined.

Most of these products are like green beans. They’re tasty with a little buttr, and you can get them anywhere, cheap. Unlike green beans though, they’re mostly based on the characteristics of a current generation of browser and a sense that the whirled wide web is the internet. It’s not, and as tele-immersion applications and the like emerge over the next few years soaking up bandwidth in ways undreamed of by the brass-ring boys, their little dreams of wealth will be dashed. Fortunately for them of course, there will remain a huge market for green beans and they’ll continue to rake a little off the top of every sale, adding value with attitude.

[This pointless little parable contains a few germs of truth, a few fantastical projections, and should be assumed to be generally meaningless, until it’s not.]