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Comment by TheJoeMan | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good examples of a working "vouch" system? I vouch for a few friends, they vouch others, etc. But if my credibility is revoked, everyone downstream of me is either yanked or needs a new voucher.

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A long time ago there was this “web of trust”, I don’t think it exists anymore. Was one of the big CA and you could get different certificates through some form of vouching, I think it even went as far as meeting people to show your ID and then they sign you or something. As it was run by a big CA, not really distributed but IIRC they kept their involvement minimal. It’s been a long time but if you’re curious maybe look into that

CACert.org, but they were never included in any major trust store.

It might have been Keybase?

Keybase got acquired back in 2020 and it's popularity -- at least among cypherpunks, seems to have dropped off.

https://keybase.io/

Keybases popularity falling off a cliff isn't really surprising, their venture into shitcoinery already put them on thin ice with the anti-cryptocurrency crowd, and then development basically ceased overnight after the Zoom acquisition. I don't know why they're even bothering to keep the lights on, it's been five years of radio silence at this point.

keybase had promise early on but kinda lost the plot. the vouching system was neat in theory but never really caught on outside a small circle. the crypto stuff definitely didn’t help, and once zoom bought them it was basically a ghost town, no roadmap, no real dev activity, just inertia.

feels like identity + trust systems keep coming back around but never quite stick. maybe too hard to balance usability, decentralization, and adoption all at once.

I tend to think the ecosystem is vastly dominated by established solutions. In order for a New Thing to win, it needs to be at least an order of magnitude better and more usable, or the network effect obliterates it.

Could it also be that social media sites depend on commingling “daily active users” vs “number of unique humans” for having high numbers? A web of trust would establish one live person per account, somewhat like Facebook had a policy for.

I feel like keybase was a good idea but needs to be redone. I guess there's keyoxide (any other?). What are people's thoughts on that?

https://keyoxide.org/

Keybase was great. The idea behind it (using private key to prove your identity) is the idea behind some of the default methods for the Decentralized Identifier (DID) standard: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-1.0/

There are some good ideas there (and Bluekey uses DIDs: https://atproto.com/specs/did)

You'll find that most self-described "CypherPunks" are just "CryptoShills".

You're thinking of the Thawte Web of Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte which was run by Mark Shuttleworth (now of Canonical). The certificates were used for email, not for SSL. I lost track of what happened to it after CACert took over.

Yes, exactly! Thank you!

There is a p2p social network (as in, people offering there services whatsoever) in France that does exactly this: it's called "Gens de confiance". It works well, although it creates kind of a gated community (as intended: it is mainly meant for upper-class social circles).

My initial thought is about GPG's "Web of Trust" system for trusting strangers' keys. But I don't know if that's a very good example since it always seemed somewhat esoteric and maybe not very successful in general.

"Working" would be a stretch, but this is how "web of trust" systems like PGP are supposed to function. Although I would say the BlueSky system sounds like it could skirt some of the pitfalls of web of trust because verifiers can also be trusted to revoke verification.

certificate authorities…?

I think the more exclusive private torrent trackers usually work on that basis.

ArXiV. Though they don't revoke papers that way

Google Pagerank

Could use follows, retweets, etc instead of page links

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