Web of Trust
Web of Trust, also known as WoT, is a concept introduced by Idena that revolves around the idea of Reputation-based identity. It operates on the principle that if person A guarantees the reliability of person B, and person B guarantees the reliability of person C, then person A has a reason to believe that person C is human, especially if other individuals, such as Y and Z, make the same claim. By gathering sufficient support of this kind, a decentralized network of authenticated participants can be formed, with no upper limit on its capacity. In fact, it is not unthinkable to have a global network of trust. However, the concept of WoT is not without its criticisms. One major criticism is that the criteria for one person to guarantee another person are intentionally completely subjective. This means that participants with less stringent verification criteria may inadvertently guarantee the names recognized in their social media feeds without knowing for sure whether those accounts are bots or not. Additionally, there is nothing to prevent users from intentionally guaranteeing bad identities. While fraudulent accounts and accounts with low reliability may eventually be rejected by the network's crowdsourcing logic, this can only happen after identities begin to interact with each other. As a result, without the confidence that a certain identity is legitimate, the current state of social media remains unchanged.
To address the challenge of obtaining the legitimacy of identity in cyberspace, the concept of Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection comes into play. This concept emphasizes the importance of verifying identity through social interactions and intersections, where multiple individuals vouch for each other's reliability. By relying on a network of trust built through these social intersections, the legitimacy of identities in cyberspace can be established more effectively.