There's a book, "Mystery of Capital", wherein the author points out is that in order for identity and contracts to work there has to be "something to lose" for the parties involved.

E.g. the power company can't supply power to slums not because of technical limits, but rather economic limits: because the residents don't have titles or leases or bank accounts there's no way to shut off the power to a household for non-payment. There's no leverage without paperwork.

It's relatively established how to do this IRL with deeds and titles and contracts and such. On the Internet it's not even clear that identity is possible to establish. Our computer systems leak like sieves and people get hacked all the time.

I was imagining just yesterday starting an MLM system based on reselling yubikeys and establishing a hardware-backed web-of-trust. I wouldn't even try to make it a pyramid: just resell the keys to your "downline" at wholesale plus the upline uh payment (I don't know the terminology.) Any infrastructure is provisioned by open bid and paid for by simple equal division among all current members. I would imagine it would amount to about a dollar or two per month per person at the very most, flat rate, not part of the MLM.

The whole point is to self-fund a hardware-backed p2p-IRL identity authentication network.