devcon8 / the graveyard of digital identity why every root of trust fails and whats left
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The Graveyard of Digital Identity: Why Every Root of Trust Fails and What's Left
Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN
Speaker: Artem B.
Type: Talk
Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic
Event: Devcon
Date: Nov 2026
Online, one person can pretend to be a thousand — and now a thousand agents can pretend to be people. Every anchor we have tried for digital identity has failed in its own instructive way. Government eIDs concentrate control. Biometric registries prove there is real demand for personhood proofs — and then become honeypots. Stake-based identity can be bought. And thirty years of web-of-trust experiments — PGP key-signing, Keybase, BrightID — collapsed for one under-appreciated reason: when trust edges are free to create, they are worthless.
This session is a guided autopsy. For each family of identity anchors — state, registry, stake, and social graph — we look at what it rooted trust in, why that seemed sound, and the precise mechanism by which it failed. From the failures, a small set of invariants emerges: trust must be scarce to mean anything.
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