PKI can be an important part of a system to authenticate your identity, but for that to work you need an identity to start with. You seem to need some sort of i

PKI can be an important part of a system to authenticate your identity, but for that to work you need an identity to start with. You seem to need some sort of identity for a society to scale. Large countries tries to function without, and the result is ad-hoc identity systems instead. A public key can be an identity, it's a perfectly workable outcome of Zooko's triangle, but it's not a very useful one for most use cases. The article is about using phone numbers to uniquely identify people and the problems that brings.