> Web of Trust failed because it lacked motivating reasons to use it, and had a very weird idea about how trust is represented (i.e. the idea of partial trust

> Web of Trust failed because it lacked motivating reasons to use it, and had a very weird idea about how trust is represented (i.e. the idea of partial trust keys meaning... What exactly?) This is true, but it's also just one among several reasons that the PGP WoT failed. Some are purely implementation and design failures that wouldn't imply to a better scheme than PGP, but others are still intractable in the general case (like timely revocations and "strong set" maintenance). > Because ultimately we're operating a web of trust system now on the internet, it's just informally specified. Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? The trust scheme that the modern web is built on is a well-specified hierarchical PKI, i.e. the exact opposite of a web of trust. But it's possible I'm misunderstanding what you mean.