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I agree that government shouldn't take an active role in running the system, but protecting the system by preventing abuse seems like a good fit. Maybe somethin

• rwl 17y ago
  I see two other roles the government can play. The first is funding research into the best way to build a distributed trust network. The other, perhaps more important, role is in creating and enforcing standards. (This role might emerge naturally from the results of research.) There must be a defined set of features that anyone providing a "trust network client" has to implement. Preferably such standards would include a provision that requires providers to let users package up their "trust data" and take it to another provider, with a guarantee that the original provider would not maintain it. (After all, you might decide that you don't trust your provider!) Otherwise, it will be the same old story: every private entity in the game will want to control their users' data, and prevent them from going elsewhere. Any moderately successful trust network will be incompatible with the others, and even those that become popular will live and die with the entities behind them. Imagine if the Internet had been built like that.