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 Identification Should Keep Plural
Zero-knowledge (ZK)-wrapped identification was lauded as a silver bullet to unravel 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 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 usually are not simply theoretical. They’re the inevitable end result of techniques that attempt to impose a single, fastened identification on a pluralistic web. One account per particular person sounds honest—till it turns into obligatory. Add ZK proofs to the combination, and all you’ve completed is encrypt the shackles.
Digital identification is turning into an necessary concern 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 knowledge through the use of cryptographic strategies. It’s like exhibiting a sealed envelope that everybody can affirm holds the correct reply, with out anybody ever opening it. In concept, this could assist privateness. However as Vitalik rightly argues, the issue isn’t what the proofs disguise, however what the system assumes.
Most ZK-ID schemes depend on a core design precept: one identification per particular person. Which 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} consumer 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 school 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 techniques 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 all over the place, think about a mannequin the place you seem in a different 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, will 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 Identification
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 fame graphs, selective disclosure, unlinkable credentials, and ZK proofs that implement contextual verification somewhat 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 fame to AI brokers—a necessity in an web more and more formed by autonomous techniques.
Don’t Struggle Surveillance With Higher Locks
Some see identification as a mandatory evil—a approach 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 techniques that allow individuals show what’s wanted, when wanted, with out turning each interplay right into a everlasting report. 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. Programs 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 knowledge can’t be rotated. Static IDs can’t be revoked. Centralized fashions can’t be made secure; 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 techniques, even when constructed on the perfect cryptography, by chance entrench the very harms they got down to stop. We share that concern. However we additionally imagine there’s a means 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 reside.
Let’s not waste our greatest cryptographic instruments on defending damaged concepts. As an alternative, let’s construct the techniques that match how individuals truly reside 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.