Yes, exactly… and of course he’s still working on bazaar: he built the whole thing from scratch, it’s his baby, why wouldn’t he? :)

You nailed the trade-off though: a lack of state ID does sound freeing for a second… until you try to do almost anything that involves other people outside of your community or civilized infrastructure. Living fully outside society in the woods or off-grid can work. But if you want to travel the world, or even see a doctor, open a bank account, rent somewhere else, or just move around freely, suddenly every door has a lock on it that only the state has the key to...

I know someone (not personally, through other people) who actually chose this as an adult. She’s the daughter of anti-communist political refugees from Vietnam. She’s (was?) a professor in France, and she deliberately refused French citizenship because she didn’t want to swear allegiance to any state. Same basic conclusion I reached (just ~ half a century earlier, lol): every state (whether it's officially totalitarian/communist or not) is the same evil wearing a slightly different mask. She uses her original status so she could officially work, but she has no passport = no travel: e.g. she couldn’t attend her son’s wedding in the US or visit her grandkids later. Even while being part of the intellectual establishment, she runs into constant practical obstacles, not because she’s some wildling in the woods, but because the states simply won’t let her move without their permission.

TL;DR: the state’s monopoly on identity is even more evil than its monopoly on money. At least with money we have Monero. With identity, we still have no real solution... which is also why “some way to help the guy” is very, very tricky...