Whatever reason it won't let me format with quotes so I'm responding with answers to your points.
1.] I couldn’t agree more. You state the Paycoin as the prime example and you are correct to do so.
2.] The “selling account” aspect could be one that is hard to track. Unless, we have it where the person has to know secret behind the code ( assuming he/she sends it along upon selling the account ) behind the badge ( which is how it works ) , or do very much sign-keys blockchain type mechanism. We are already talking about better ways to do things also.
3.] I get where you are coming from.
4.] We are going to do another follow-up post explain what is needed. We figured by dropping into the chat, or via email you would get an answer this way also, but you are right. We need to clearly state this.
5.] There will be more coming up in a follow-up post, but the early answer is we aren’t equipped for this yet. We’ll ramp up to better handle this when it does come about.
6.] We really appreciate the feedback. The more the better. We are going to build a follow-up post with a FAQ this weekend to better clarified some of the issues you raised along with some others mentioned.
I’d like to be clear. This isn’t supposed to be 100% proof as nothing is, BUT we like to think of it as a ‘soft verification’ , or a ‘trust leg’ to get the conversation started and establish some best practices on how we can get people into the trust economy ,but keep their Identity protected. We are glad to engage in this discussion! We are also building the website. More to come and thank you!
Thanks for the reply.
Also, I know that @ned and the Steemit team have been looking at verification solutions as well.
I'm sure they are happy to see other users work on this in a decentralized fashion.
It'd be also nice to see what sort of other legal protections can be given to other users if they provide you with documentation of their identities and what legal means you are doing for collecting these documents.
Can you track or be notified if a password changes on an account? If so that is a signal that the account has changed hands and needs to be reverified. Also could have an expiry date, that all accounts need to be reverified after 3 months or 6 months.
Is there a way you can host the image and then have the image connected to the link switch after expiry to say "verification expired", when reverified it gets restored back to original verified image. Url must stay constant, only image switches.
Lastly, charge 5$ per verification to make your project sustainable longterm and keep you involved.
@steemdrive good suggestion. There should be a way to figure something out like this. Good thinking on that aspect of things. Expiration for re-verification is a good idea.