The part of my comment you quoted was referring to preventing people from disingenuously proxying for another entity, not to maintaining their own personal anon

The part of my comment you quoted was referring to preventing people from disingenuously proxying for another entity, not to maintaining their own personal anonymity. Regarding accidentally revealing oneself, that's always a risk. If you create an anonymous HN identity but then inadvertently link it back to yourself then all previous posts under that account are immediately traceable as well. Web of trust itself is easy and already widely used by many free software communities as a decentralized means of securing reputation based identities (anonymous or otherwise). The challenge is in allowing an established identity (established either via reputation, government ID, in person interaction, whatever) to perform an anonymous but trusted (ie authenticated) interaction with the network. In other words, to implement a web of trust scheme that supports anonymized but otherwise verified interactions via zero knowledge proofs.