I think the easiest solution on the technical side is to add the whitelisting feature of bitshares to steem.

Technically, a whitelist doesn't do anything except express that you know some guy. If I know @cass, I add him to my whitelist, he knows Daniel, so I have a connection to Daniel as well. That way you can build a web of trust similar to what you know from facebook, linkedin etc. Together with the account recovery feature, this allows your steem account to become the safest internet identity you could ever have!