Can everything get an identity?
Yes. Take a chocolate bar, for example. A chocolate bar doesn’t have any electronic things in it but you can give the chocolate bar an identifier by just printing a long number on the package. And then you could add credentials to that. For example, to say it is made out of fairtrade chocolate. And this fairtrade chocolate credential is issued by an NGO, which decides what is fairtrade or not.
And if later they change their production method and it’s not fairtrade any more, the chocolate maker still has the credential and they can put it on their package all the time. So the attester, or the NGO, needs to be able to recheck if everything is still okay. And in this case, they see it’s no longer fairtrade so they can just revoke the credential.
And then a consumer could possibly scan the number and find out from a database if this chocolate is really fairtrade or not, and if it contains anything that they could be allergic to, like peanuts or whatever, and all this information can then be stored and can be verifiably made public. So it’s not only for people and electronic devices, anything can be given an identity.