Some good thoughts. Perhaps a similar approach is staked Bitcoin (why similar? It adds a cost) that doesn’t move could be used. However there would then be a market selling UTXOs of hodlers. Even renting this would be 10-100x cheaper than buying that Bitcoin. The issue with web of trust is that your weakest link is always the easiest route. Computers don’t care if it takes months to progress. And the next issue is even closed/small highly verified networks don’t cater for the wider audience social media we largely use today. What if it was your grandma who trusted the bad actor? Bye grandma? The next issue is just like world coin using eye balls to ‘verify humans’, people will sell their human verification - or identities of the dead get to live again.

Yeah, so say grandma is trying to use the thing like normal, but someone convinced her to verify them in person and then proceeded to create the web of bots. All grandma has to do is cut that one verification off the tree and it would eliminate the bots that were connected to that bad contact. Reputation can be boosted or diminished based on the #of verifications from others in your tree, so in theory, the bad actors would be easier to spot because theyd be stuck in their own little tree and only able to verify via a human actor that would give them a verification.