RE: Verified Accounts - Reputation System
There are ways to do this without posting a picture of yourself on the internet...
Before forcing everyone to join facebook, or link their Linked-in, (or allow the dataminers to make the connection by forcing a photo post), consider the effects on free speech and free expression. There is a wide variety of subjects that will not be available if users are forced to identify themselves before posting on a public blockchain.
Services like Onename.com are starting up that verify you are you by linking your account to other accounts, and also by burning some bitcoin to prove its not a throwaway account. OpenBazaar.com is incorporating this service into their online stores, allowing customers to verify stores and owners.
There is also PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). With PGP you can verify you are the owner of the account by posting your public key and then by signing your messages with your private key. Once you have posted your public key, people can verify you are the person that sent the message and that the message has not been tampered with, by verifying the hash of the message and key. With all the public\private Steem keys, this would not be hard to learn to do. (and not hard to integrate into steemit, if there was a will to do so).
Before starting an "Identify yourself" campaign to "Become one of us, one of us, one of us" chant. Consider the alternatives that allow everyone to keep their privacy and anonymity.
There is already crypto on the blockchain so why add extra redundancy. All GPG adds to steem is a web-of-trust that could easily be added by introducing 'whitelists' similar to BitShares. Essentially it works like this:
Hold on, that is just making it complicated for no reason. I don't want to trust some authority and their decisions on who to trust.
I am simply talking about verifying your identity and the contents of your messages by using PGP's sign features. Nothing more. By posting your public key on steemit\reddit\website and signing your messages\tweets\posts\instagrams, you would be verifying it was created by your accounts and your message was unchanged. This is simple and easy enough for regular people to do, without a bunch of requirements or software changes.
Isn't that what the memo key was originally for anyway?
You don't need to trust any other authority ..
you can get your own whitelist ..
If you want to link people with a gpg key, then go for it. but using PGP ontop of steem only adds redundancy that could also be added to the protocol with whitelists.