That was my point, too: the theorized system already exists. I'm definitely not advocating its use.

Ultimately, the URL bar needs to go away. More fundamentally, the asymmetric relationship between very large organizations that authenticate their identity with browser CA certs, and individuals who authenticate their identity with passwords needs to change.

Cryptographically generated addressing schemes like Telehash can do the automate-able stuff better than the current CA situation. The problem (and solution) I'm struggling to articulate involves the fact that granular authorization systems and trust databases need better UI before we can really fix this.

I suspect cheaper hardware tokens will play a significant role.