Sign's attestation model lets anyone become an attester. No permission required. You stake your reputation, sign claims about the world, and the protocol records it. The first time I understood this properly, it felt like the most honest design choice I had seen in the identity space. Trust without gatekeepers. Reputation built in public, verifiable by anyone
Then I started thinking about what reputation actually means here.
and something started to feel off.
Reputation in Sign's model is circular. You trust an attester because other trusted entities trust them. Those entities are trusted because even more established entities trusted them first. Follow the chain back far enough and you always arrive at the same place: a small group of early, well-connected actors whose credibility the entire system inherited from somewhere outside the protocol.
The UAE government deploys Sign for national infrastructure. Suddenly every institution in that ecosystem treats government signed attestations as the gold standard. Not because the government proved superior attestation quality. Because it was the government. Every independent attester who built reputation over months is now competing against an entity whose credibility came from political authority, not from anything the protocol can measure.
The harder I look at this, the more I see the same pattern repeating.
Sign does not remove institutional advantage from the trust system. It transcribes it. Power that used to live inside closed databases moves onto a public ledger where it becomes transparent, auditable, and just as unevenly distributed as before. That is genuinely better than the alternative. But it is not what permissionless tends to imply
So when Sign says anyone can become a trusted attester, I read it less as a promise and more as a question the protocol never fully answers: in a system where reputation flows downward from whoever arrived with the most credibility, what does it actually take for someone who starts with none to ever be trusted at the same level?