So, you said the concept died when you needed to put faith into a service provided by some third party provider, or a service you have to provide yourself. I don’t see how this is different than anything else on the Internet… particularly e-mail. Most people use a 3rd party provider for e-mail, and those who do not want to trust those providers (including myself) host their entire e-mail stack themselves. If you’re comfortable with the way e-mail works on the Internet, then you should be comfortable with the way OpenID works. (This touches a legitimate OpenID problem: it does authentication, not identification, so it does nothing to prevent abuse from spammers. That’s another topic, however).

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of logins. With OpenID, I only need to remember my authentication with my OpenID provider, something that I would use so frequently that it’d be difficult to forget. Because it’s centralized and I only have one to remember, I can change also it’s credentials more often and do all those good security practices that few ever actually do.

Now, onto the real benefit of OpenID: it’s a framework. It puts a lot of power in the hands of the provider, but that’s the point. That provider (which you can control) can perform any kind of whacked-out challenge to verify you imaginable. Some things that exist today (or could exist):

Verify a user by some second factor, such as an RSA SecurID token, or a browser certificate (done by Verisign’s PIP).

Verify a user by a key file stored on their computer, such as their GPG key. Provider could leverage something like FireGPG and GpgAuth.

Verify a user by their fingerprint or some other biometric. Provider could interact with some other software controlling another authentication device.

So, the point is, OpenID is a lot better than anything else we’re doing now, and it enables sophistication and better security.

Yes, all of the above could be done with some kind of fat client (i.e. in-browser) password manager, but guess what, we’ve had decades to do it and no one has come up with a good solution (and it’s still not secure—the weakest link is still the password!).

If you need OpenID cause you use multiple pc’s – get a laptop!