GnuPG/PGP and the web of trust[0]. A lot of things I see blockchain being used for today (e.g. NFTs) seems like it would be better solved using standard OpenPGP signatures with no backing chain.
Additionally, as machine-generated content proliferates, I think having services use something like the web of trust concept for membership would be super powerful. The problem is, of course, the terrible UX of cryptographic signatures. But I think there's a lot of opportunity for the group that makes it easy to use.
There's a problem though: either you have to ban transferring NFTs (or other tokens), which makes those a lot less useful, or you need something to prevent double spend attacks (something that blockchain solves).
GPG is great. It also makes it really easy to encrypt environment dotfiles that safely reside in your source code repository. This is my favorite way of storing sensitive app configs. You don't even need a PGP private key in your keychain to do it. You can use a passphrase.
As a follow-up to the web of trust, I was pretty excited about Keybase and the breadth of applications they enabled, with a slick UX for web-of-trust. Pity they didn't quite succeed (got acqired/acquihired by Zoom), but it would be wonderful if something like that got another life.
Just curious, which would be most reliable? One entity confirms it who confirmed 1000 previous results, 2 who confirmed 500, 10 who confirmed 100 or 1000 who confirmed 1 previously?
Would many thousands of entities, who confirmed hundreds of thousands of previous results be preferable over hundreds of thousands of entities, who confirmed many thousands of previous results?
Additionally, as machine-generated content proliferates, I think having services use something like the web of trust concept for membership would be super powerful. The problem is, of course, the terrible UX of cryptographic signatures. But I think there's a lot of opportunity for the group that makes it easy to use.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust