> Just to be clear, I reject your contention that there might be some sort of identity verification benefit associated with distributing the keys across the SKS

> Just to be clear, I reject your contention that there might be some sort of identity verification benefit associated with distributing the keys across the SKS network. I don't understand why you think I'm contending this. The claim is not that SKS distributes meaningfully verifiable identities, it's that there is no longer a reliable, scalable way to discover public keys at all in PGP. Whether or not you trust those public keys or the claimant human identities in them is a separate subsequent step; the entire argument is that the failure mode happens before then, and that this makes PGP an unsuitable serious choice for scaling signatures on PyPI. (PGP fingerprints are a red herring -- it doesn't matter how forgeable or unforgeable a key's fingerprint is if I can't discover the key. No key, no verification, full stop.)