A contacts list is a superset of the publicly available connections that would make up a web of trust. Out of all my contacts, there are a few people that I wo

A contacts list is a superset of the publicly available connections that would make up a web of trust. Out of all my contacts, there are a few people that I would be willing to vouch for. As in: declare publicly that I know who they are, and reveal the name that I refer to them as. That pet name may be different from person to person, but that's fine. Alice might call a public key "Bobby's Public Key", and Charlie might call it "Robert's Public Key". I can make sense of those attestations when I'm trying to verify that I have Bob's key, and assign it my own pet name. If Alice or Charlie weren't willing to publicly attest to the Bob-ness of the same public key then I wouldn't be looking at their attestations.