The next is a visitor put up and opinion from Evin McMullen, Co-founder & CEO at Billions.Community.
ZK Received’t Save Us: Why Digital Identification Should Keep Plural
Zero-knowledge (ZK)-wrapped identification was lauded as a silver bullet to resolve all the things 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 aren’t simply theoretical. They’re the inevitable consequence of methods that attempt to impose a single, fastened identification on a pluralistic web. One account per individual sounds truthful—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 vital subject for governments, as proven by the G7 commissioning a report final yr 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 permit 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 suitable reply, with out anybody ever opening it. In principle, this could assist 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. That may make sense for voting or stopping bots. However in actual life, individuals function throughout many social contexts—work, household, on-line, and many others.—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 simple to weaponize.
In such a system, coercion turns into a trivial matter. Employers, governments, or apps can demand {that a} person reveal all their linked identities. Pseudonymity turns into unattainable, particularly when IDs are reused throughout functions or anchored to immutable credentials. Even the phantasm of unlinkability breaks down underneath strain from machine studying, correlation assaults, or good old style energy.
What started as a privateness software turns into surveillance infrastructure, however with a nicer interface.
Identification Isn’t the Drawback; 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 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 international ID that follows you all over the place, think about a mannequin the place you seem in another way to every app, platform, or neighborhood—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, might be coerced into revealing all the things about your self.
This isn’t a fantasy. It’s already working.
Profile DIDs and the Case for Context-Primarily based Identification
One strategy already in manufacturing makes use of per-app Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) in order that even colluding platforms can’t hyperlink a person’s personas.
It’s a structural repair, not only a cryptographic one. As an alternative of constructing international registries that bind individuals to a single identification, we are able to anchor belief in pluralistic fashions that includes decentralized status graphs, selective disclosure, unlinkable credentials, and ZK proofs that implement contextual verification reasonably than static identifiers.
This technique is already utilized by over 9,000 initiatives, 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 status to AI brokers—a necessity in an web more and more formed by autonomous methods.
Don’t Combat Surveillance With Higher Locks
Some see identification as a needed evil—a technique to stop 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 want methods that allow individuals show what’s wanted, when wanted, with out turning each interplay right into a everlasting document. Need to show you’re not a bot? Tremendous. 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. Programs that use coercive biometrics, inflexible registries, or international databases to implement identification might 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’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 identification methods, even when constructed on the most effective 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 an alternative, let’s construct the methods that match how individuals really stay and the way we wish the web to work.
The way forward for digital identification doesn’t have to be common. It merely must be human.
