Putting crypto currency to one side, you are aware of the pgp 'strong set'? because six degrees of Kevin Bacon says a handful is a serious underestimate of how good transitive trust can be. The strong set is quite large.
That word "transitive" is a very important qualifier here: it's weaker than an absolute statement but hierarchical PKI turns out to be weaker than theory, in practice.
Crypto coins are trash. Signatures are not trash. Behaviour of people and systems performing signing including HSM operators are mutable and worrisome.
I'm aware of the strong set, but I was under the impression that it didn't accomplish much anymore -- GnuPG disabled SKS lookups a while back, in response to the network's inability to handle thousands of clearly malicious key attestations. The last major topological analysis I can find of the strong set was back in 2015, one year before the first series of spam attacks on SKS.
(But don't get me wrong: signatures are great! I'm just skeptical of the WoT, from multiple angles.)
As usual I'm behind the times. It peaked at 60,000 in 2018 and declined and people stopped believing in it around 2020, some people earlier. My point about scale was a footnote to history, not relevant.
That word "transitive" is a very important qualifier here: it's weaker than an absolute statement but hierarchical PKI turns out to be weaker than theory, in practice.
Crypto coins are trash. Signatures are not trash. Behaviour of people and systems performing signing including HSM operators are mutable and worrisome.