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You can have fully decentralized identities quite trivially: just create a public/private key. No consensus algorithms required. With browsers now supporting synchronization features to connect the browsers on all systems used by a single user, such a system could actually work quite well now, without the usability issues it would once have had.

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This is a variety of SPKI[1], right? I was thinking of a conventional PKI approach, with an adapted web of trust to verify identities [2].

You are right - theoretically this could work. But it would pretty much take a "boil the ocean" approach to make it work.

Browsers would need to implement a secure (private) keystore, and presumably some way to sync that to other browsers.

A whole new standardized authentication flow would need to be created, which wouldn't be the same as the existing certificate-based authentication (which no one uses anyway)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_public_key_infrastructur...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure#Web_o...

"boil the ocean"

This particular ocean should be fairly easy to boil with a browser extension for all popular browsers.

Huh? Browsers support client SSL certs today, but for some reason nobody uses them except intranets.

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