Proof of Identity Means Three Different Things, and Conflating Them Is the Error
The phrase turns up three times in this project meaning three different things. Most confusion about what a wallet does comes from sliding between them, so here they are separately.
One: proving you control a key
You sign a challenge with a private key, and whoever asked checks it against the public key in your identifier's document.
This is what the wallet does, and it is the sense in which it can honestly claim to prove anything. It says nothing about who you are. It says the same party is back.
It is also demonstrable rather than argued: an identifier resolves publicly, the document names the key, and a signature either verifies against it or does not.
Two: proving a fact about you that somebody else established
An issuer checked something, signed a statement about it, and you present that statement.
The wallet does not do this yet. It keeps a catalogue of your credentials rather than the credentials, so there is nothing to present, and the share button produces an unsigned summary that says as much in its own words.
This is the sense most people mean when they say proof of identity, and it is the sense in which this wallet currently proves nothing.
Note what the second sense requires that the first does not: somebody else. A key proves itself. A fact needs a party who checked it, and this surface is not that party. Establishing facts about people is a different product's work, and nothing here offers it.
Three: a rule about who may validate
Our own node content uses the phrase for something else entirely: a proposed rule gating who is allowed to take part in consensus.
That page concedes its position in its opening paragraph rather than a footnote, and we are quoting it rather than softening it: the live validator set is admitted on a stake minimum alone, and nothing in the running code checks that a validator operator holds a verified-human credential. The name describes an intended design and not current behaviour.
Nothing about your wallet touches this sense. It is a question about validators, not about you.
Why the conflation matters
Because each sense has a different failure mode, and a claim that slides between them hides all three.
Sliding one into two makes a signature look like an identity check. It is not, and a system that treats key control as proof of personhood will admit anybody who generated a key.
Sliding two into three makes a consensus design sound like it verifies people today. Our own page says it does not.
Sliding three into one makes a chain sound like it knows who its users are. It does not, and it is not trying to.
The three senses resolve to three different answers about our own product. Yes, not yet, and not applicable.
What to ask when somebody uses the phrase
Which one do you mean, and who checked? If the answer is "the key proves it", the honest reading is sense one. If the answer names an issuer, it is sense two, and the next question is whether the holder can actually present the credential.