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simonratoday at 5:14 PM1 replyview on HN

> I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.

Living in a place where getting a replacement sim is gated behind obtaining an id from the police tied to your national id number, I wish there were other identity systems which were as robust. Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device, than relying on backup services you need one of your digital id devices to access in the first place, especially if they're all lost at the same time in a house fire or something. The police will presumably get all my photo backups and savings if they ask nicely anyways, so the big threat to the single point of failure doesn't have a great marginal impact, while I dread the possibility of having to recover the accounts I can't get back through the local legal system given the poor 2fa recovery ecosystem.


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bluebarbettoday at 6:56 PM

>Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device

If the device can get damaged or lost, then the SIM can too. To buy a physical SIM or rent a virtual number online, in most jurisdictions you need to provide ID docs these days, so nothing is changed there.