The following is a guest post and opinion from Evin McMullen, Co-founder & CEO at Billions.Network.
ZK Won’t Save Us: Why Digital Identity Must Stay Plural
Zero-knowledge (ZK)-wrapped identity was lauded as a silver bullet to solve everything about presenting yourself online—providing verifiable, privacy-preserving proof of personhood without the need to trust governments, platforms, or biometric databases.
But as Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin argued in June, encryption alone can’t fix “architecture-level” coercion. When identity becomes rigid, centralized, and one-size-fits-all, pseudonymity dies and coercion becomes inevitable.
The risks Vitalik raised in his recent post are not just theoretical. They are the inevitable outcome of systems that try to impose a single, fixed identity on a pluralistic internet. One account per person sounds fair—until it becomes mandatory. Add ZK proofs to the mix, and all you’ve done is encrypt the shackles.
Digital identity is bec
We współpracy z: https://cryptoslate.com/does-digital-id-have-risks-even-if-its-zk-wrapped/
