The next is a visitor publish and opinion from Evin McMullen, Co-founder & CEO at Billions.Community.
ZK Received’t Save Us: Why Digital Id Should Keep Plural
Zero-knowledge (ZK)-wrapped id was lauded as a silver bullet to resolve every little thing about presenting your self on-line—offering verifiable, privacy-preserving proof of personhood with out the necessity to belief governments, platforms, or biometric databases.
However as Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin argued in June, encryption alone can’t repair “architecture-level” coercion. When id turns into inflexible, centralized, and one-size-fits-all, pseudonymity dies and coercion turns into inevitable.
The dangers Vitalik raised in his current publish should not simply theoretical. They’re the inevitable final result of methods that attempt to impose a single, fastened id on a pluralistic web. One account per individual sounds honest—till it turns into necessary. Add ZK proofs to the combo, and all you’ve carried out is encrypt the shackles.
Digital id is changing into an essential concern for governments, as proven by the G7 commissioning a report final 12 months to tell coverage, and the EU’s summit in Berlin in June to evaluate its regulatory framework for digital identities and belief providers.
The Limits of ZK Alone
Zero-knowledge proofs enable customers to show statements—age, residency, uniqueness—with out revealing underlying private information through the use of cryptographic strategies. It’s like displaying a sealed envelope that everybody can verify holds the precise reply, with out anybody ever opening it. In principle, this could help privateness. However as Vitalik rightly argues, the issue just isn’t what the proofs disguise, however what the system assumes.
Most ZK-ID schemes depend on a core design precept: one id per individual. That may make sense for voting or stopping bots. However in actual life, individuals function throughout many social contexts—work, household, on-line, and so on.—that don’t map neatly onto a single ID. Imposing a one-person, one-ID mannequin, even with ZK wrappers, creates a brittle system that’s straightforward to weaponize.
In such a system, coercion turns into a trivial matter. Employers, governments, or apps can demand {that a} consumer reveal all their linked identities. Pseudonymity turns into not possible, particularly when IDs are reused throughout functions or anchored to immutable credentials. Even the phantasm of unlinkability breaks down beneath stress from machine studying, correlation assaults, or good old style energy.
What started as a privateness instrument turns into surveillance infrastructure, however with a nicer interface.
Id Isn’t the Downside; Uniformity Is
ZK-wrapped methods don’t fail as a result of ZK is flawed; they fail as a result of the encompassing structure clings to an outdated idea of id that’s singular, static, and centralized. That’s not how people function, and it’s not how the web works.
The choice is pluralism. As a substitute of 1 world ID that follows you in every single place, think about a mannequin the place you seem in a different way to every app, platform, or group—provably human and reliable, however contextually distinctive. Your credentials are native, not common. You’re verifiable with out being traceable. And nobody, not even you, could be coerced into revealing every little thing about your self.
This isn’t a fantasy. It’s already working.
Profile DIDs and the Case for Context-Based mostly Id
One strategy already in manufacturing makes use of per-app Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) in order that even colluding platforms can’t hyperlink a consumer’s personas.
It’s a structural repair, not only a cryptographic one. As a substitute of constructing world registries that bind individuals to a single id, we will anchor belief in pluralistic fashions that includes decentralized fame graphs, selective disclosure, unlinkable credentials, and ZK proofs that implement contextual verification fairly than static identifiers.
This method is already utilized by over 9,000 tasks, together with TikTok and Deutsche Financial institution. And it’s not only for people. The identical framework powers Billions Community’s DeepTrust initiative, extending verifiable id and fame to AI brokers—a necessity in an web more and more formed by autonomous methods.
Don’t Battle Surveillance With Higher Locks
Some see id as a crucial evil—a technique to stop misinformation or spam. However good id design doesn’t require surveillance. It simply requires context.
We don’t want one ID to rule all of them. We’d like methods that permit individuals show what’s wanted, when wanted, with out turning each interplay right into a everlasting file. Need to show you’re not a bot? Effective. Show uniqueness. Need to show you’re over 18? Nice. Do it with out handing over your birthdate, postcode, and biometric template.
Crucially, we should resist the urge to equate compliance with centralization. Techniques that use coercive biometrics, inflexible registries, or world databases to implement id could look environment friendly. However they introduce doubtlessly catastrophic dangers: irreversible breaches, discrimination, exclusion, and even geopolitical misuse. Biometric information can’t be rotated. Static IDs can’t be revoked. Centralized fashions can’t be made secure; they’ll solely be made out of date.
Vitalik Is Proper, However the Future Is Already Right here
Vitalik’s essay warns of a future the place id methods, even when constructed on the very best cryptography, unintentionally entrench the very harms they got down to stop. We share that concern. However we additionally imagine there’s a method ahead: one which doesn’t compromise on privateness, implement uniformity, or flip individuals into nodes on a worldwide registry.
That path is pluralistic and decentralized, and it’s already stay.
Let’s not waste our greatest cryptographic instruments on defending damaged concepts. As a substitute, let’s construct the methods that match how individuals truly stay and the way we would like the web to work.
The way forward for digital id doesn’t should be common. It merely must be human.
Talked about on this article
