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We have the technology to manage credit in ways that are vastly more private and secure than a giant, poorly run, insecure personal data repository. Using stro
by wyager 9y ago
We have the technology to manage credit in ways that are vastly more private and secure than a giant, poorly run, insecure personal data repository.
Using strong cryptography, we can build pseudonymous trust graphs where nodes in the graph (cryptographic identities) publish cryptographically auditable trust relationships. Using various graph exploration techniques (e.g. unrolling the trust graph into a trust DAG with known creditors as terminal nodes and calculating path properties to those nodes, using proof-of-burn and non-distributive path combination to disincentivize Sybil attacks on the trust graph, etc.) we can estimate trustworthiness (or, more specifically, creditworthiness) of cryptographic identities rather than legal identities. In the end, you're probably still going to want to link at least one cryptographic with your bank account, but you would have vastly more control over the relationship between privacy and public verifiability of trustworthiness.
If course, just because this is possible doesn't mean it's going to happen. The primary obstacles to an open, secure trust system are that A) it's harder to make people manage their own trust network than it is to spy on them B) trust networks rely on the network effect and C) there's no obvious way to make money off it. Any extant system that resembles what I've described is mostly limited to tech nerds. I'm not sure what it would take to trick/convince the general population to use such a system.