I don;t know how they plan on implementing ID verification, but that's essentially our long-term business plan for Moonstone too. The idea is that if you want to trade stocks and bonds and other financial assets on the blockchain you need to be able to white-list IDs which can hold and trade these assets. Gateways would issue these assets on Bitshares.
We think the most elegant way is to add an ID field to each Pub.Key which can hold a certificate on-blockchain from a specific gateway or ID verification service. The certificate would be simply a tag in a way.
If we had this capability and wallet infrastructure now, we would have issued stock for Moonstone instead. We know several other businesses who are also interested in issuing stock legally on Bitshares.
That said, I have the distinct feeling that Ripple is going to go a vastly more restrictive route than our proposal.
Isn't there a way to ensure anonymity AND unique identifiability?
I'd imagine it would utilize a hash of information as opposed to the real information.
Though I understand the necessity of whitelisting for mainstream adoption, most people tend to forget that by simply pushing forward with whitelisting, we are indirectly creating a "blacklist" as well.
This means that it will be very difficult over time for users to remain anonymous on the web because if they do not "take the mark" they will not be able to transact in the new paradigm.
Let us not forget that most of these really strict know your customer laws came into effect after the False Flag 9/11 attack started the "war on terror" (otherwise known as the war of terror). So if we are talking about "terrorism" being the main reason for the necessity of "whitelists" and "blacklists", we are talking about changing privacy for all sovereigns based on a threat that is far less likely to threaten the population than, say, getting struck by lightning or dying from falling in the shower.
I sometimes (and perhaps naively) hold out hope that BitShares has the potential to help people see that privacy and anonymity are actually keystones to liberty and freedom, and that there are solutions that align far better with voluntarism and non-violence. I hope I'm not wrong :/