Well, that's the crux of the problem, isn't it? We need a way for you to confirm that it's you and not someone else who has stolen your credentials. Multiple factors of authentication generally work well enough against this. Same for physical devices, be it those eID cards or something like YubiKey or whatever.
> I am pretty happy to self-certify myself.
Well, that's how GPG/PGP works - as long as you give your public key to other people by yourself, be it in person or otherwise. Then you can manage the private certificates for signing stuff yourself however you wish - be it keeping them in a cloud account somewhere (hopefully not), on a local HDD, a USB stick, or printed on a piece of paper where you'd re-type it as necessary (just a silly example).
The problem is that people want a central authority for certain cases, such as interacting with the government - with the appropriate set of software and middleware built around it, so less technically literate people could just put the card in a reader, input a few codes in some official software and be on their way, rather than trying to figure out what the hell a keychain is.
Well, that's the crux of the problem, isn't it? We need a way for you to confirm that it's you and not someone else who has stolen your credentials. Multiple factors of authentication generally work well enough against this. Same for physical devices, be it those eID cards or something like YubiKey or whatever.
> I am pretty happy to self-certify myself.
Well, that's how GPG/PGP works - as long as you give your public key to other people by yourself, be it in person or otherwise. Then you can manage the private certificates for signing stuff yourself however you wish - be it keeping them in a cloud account somewhere (hopefully not), on a local HDD, a USB stick, or printed on a piece of paper where you'd re-type it as necessary (just a silly example).
The problem is that people want a central authority for certain cases, such as interacting with the government - with the appropriate set of software and middleware built around it, so less technically literate people could just put the card in a reader, input a few codes in some official software and be on their way, rather than trying to figure out what the hell a keychain is.