We have watched the alternative play out before. When regulators told websites to obtain consent, they specified the goal and not the method, and the market answered with the cookie banner, the pop-up you dismiss a hundred times a week without reading. Crypto built its own version: upload your ID to everyone. A passport copy in a hundred databases, protecting almost no one and enriching whoever breaches the weakest of them.
And this is only the rehearsal. The internet is being rebuilt around software that acts on our behalf, and the familiar sorting of traffic into “bot” or “human” is already breaking down. A third category is emerging: verified agents transacting, with permission, for real people. Those agents will move money, and they will have to prove they are authorized and what they are allowed to do, at machine speed and machine volume. If they inherit today’s model and drag their owner’s full identity through every service they touch, we will not have a handful of honeypots. We will have billions of them, refreshed continuously, that never sleep.
The $320 million will most likely come back. The addresses, the IDs, and the faces will not. The lesson of these weeks is not that we need higher walls around the data we hoard. It is that we are hoarding data we never needed to collect. The technology to prove without surrendering already exists: provable, private, and portable, for people today and for their agents tomorrow. The only question is whether we adopt it before the honeypot becomes the permanent architecture of both.
