In practice a web of trust is only trustworthy 1 degree out from you. Just because you trust someone doesn't mean you should trust the people they trust. The web of trust is a difficult to use misfeature. In theory it's great. In practice it's unusable.
Re:The PGP Problem
by Natanael_L on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @08:52AM
(#20458852)
The problem is nobody uses this right
The "Web of Trust" [0] fills that role:
> As time goes on, you will accumulate keys from other people that you may want to designate as trusted introducers. Everyone else will each choose their own trusted introducers. And everyone will gradually accumulate and distribute with their key a collection of certifying signatures from other people, with the expectation that anyone receiving it will trust at least one or two of the signatures. This will cause the emergence of a decentralized fault-tolerant web of confidence for all public keys.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust