The next is a visitor put up and opinion from Evin McMullen, Co-founder & CEO at Billions.Community.
ZK Gained’t Save Us: Why Digital Id Should Keep Plural
Zero-knowledge (ZK)-wrapped identification was lauded as a silver bullet to resolve all the pieces 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 identification turns into inflexible, centralized, and one-size-fits-all, pseudonymity dies and coercion turns into inevitable.
The dangers Vitalik raised in his latest put up should not simply theoretical. They’re the inevitable consequence of programs that attempt to impose a single, mounted identification on a pluralistic web. One account per individual sounds honest—till it turns into necessary. Add ZK proofs to the combination, and all you’ve accomplished is encrypt the shackles.
Digital identification is turning into an essential challenge 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 by utilizing cryptographic strategies. It’s like exhibiting a sealed envelope that everybody can verify holds the best reply, with out anybody ever opening it. In principle, this could help privateness. However as Vitalik rightly argues, the issue is just not what the proofs disguise, however what the system assumes.
Most ZK-ID schemes depend on a core design precept: one identification per individual. Which 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. Implementing 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 inconceivable, 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 school energy.
What started as a privateness software turns into surveillance infrastructure, however with a nicer interface.
Id Isn’t the Drawback; Uniformity Is
ZK-wrapped programs don’t fail as a result of ZK is flawed; they fail as a result of the encircling structure clings to an outdated idea of identification 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 an alternative of 1 world ID that follows you in every single place, think about a mannequin the place you seem otherwise 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, will be coerced into revealing all the pieces about your self.
This isn’t a fantasy. It’s already working.
Profile DIDs and the Case for Context-Primarily based 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 an alternative of constructing world registries that bind individuals to a single identification, we will anchor belief in pluralistic fashions that includes decentralized popularity 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 identification and popularity to AI brokers—a necessity in an web more and more formed by autonomous programs.
Don’t Struggle Surveillance With Higher Locks
Some see identification as a essential evil—a solution to forestall misinformation or spam. However good identification design doesn’t require surveillance. It simply requires context.
We don’t want one ID to rule all of them. We’d like programs that permit individuals show what’s wanted, when wanted, with out turning each interplay right into a everlasting document. Wish to show you’re not a bot? High-quality. Show uniqueness. Wish 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 identification could look environment friendly. However they introduce probably 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 protected; they will 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 identification programs, even when constructed on the perfect cryptography, by chance entrench the very harms they got down to forestall. We share that concern. However we additionally consider 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 dwell.
Let’s not waste our greatest cryptographic instruments on defending damaged concepts. As an alternative, let’s construct the programs that match how individuals really dwell and the way we wish the web to work.
The way forward for digital identification doesn’t must be common. It merely must be human.
