They've been working on this since last year and still haven't figured out the question of "who will we trust tokens from". You'd think that such a question would have been the focus from the very beginning! Lot of "I hope", "I'd love to", and "wondering if we might be able to" and other such non-committal language regarding the kind of power that is given to token issuers.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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PACTs will let websites “with strong knowledge of ‘personhood’” issue anonymous tokens that browser users and designated bots can present at other websites, [...]
This sounds like another attempt at what google already tried with “web environment integrity”.
If I got it straight, users can ask certain websites to vouch for their "personhood" and get a token that proves it. What exactly prevents a human from creating a token and hand it to a bot or crawler? How is it helping websites operators to differenciate legitimate traffic from the rest?
A human can, but as soon as that is discovered that human is rejected. They have to slowly develop a whole new persona, likely taking years - before they are trusted again.
At least for now when Kids regularly grow up enough to join the internet and so we have to have ways to let new people in. If tokens ever trade to a real verified human it may not be possible to get another. (though I doubt this - governments in some places will issue tokens to bots and real humans and so there is no way to tell without cutting off someone real.)
Limiting traffic already exists, and it's called proof of work. Try it out.
Tor implemented it in August of 2023 and was an extremely successful integration.
Here we go again. Obviously they will implement this in the most correct way possible....what could go wrong? /s
This reminds me of when Telegram announced they had reinvented the concept of end-to-end encryption. Something stinks, and I can't put my finger on it because I'm not a cryptography expert.
But I'm not going to be thrilled until somebody I trust is able to validate it one way or the other first.