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Trust cannot be decentralized. The whole idea of blockchain/Bitcoin[1] was eliminating trust from a process that would have required trust (keeping track of a l
by zelly 7y ago
Trust cannot be decentralized. The whole idea of blockchain/Bitcoin[1] was eliminating trust from a process that would have required trust (keeping track of a ledger of funds). A system that provides trust in a trustless way is as paradoxical as it sounds. However you implement it, what some humans say have to serve as inputs to the system, and in reality that's who you're trusting.
The best you can do is have just one central reference store of trust/reputation. China's social credit score is a working implementation of this. I don't think the West will ever be ready for that though, so you're going to have to deal with the fragmentation.
[1] The innovation was requiring a computationally difficult problem to be solved to participate in the network and using hash functions to prevent tampering. This made any participant (miner) in the Bitcoin network a dumb cog in the machine that could be replaced by another. The people aren't special; the computational work is special.
- mikekchar 7y agoI completely agree with what you said, however I think there would be some very good value in simply keeping track of online relationships. I think the "web of trust" is actually very useful, if misnamed. Let's say I go to my online bank. I have a problem and I want to talk to the manager. It would be really great if I could have an easy way of determining if the person who is speaking to me is actually associated with the website I'm thinking of. I don't need to know their name. I don't need to know if they have a shady past or not. I just need to know that the somebody the website is going to let me talk to is the same somebody I'm talking to. Right now you can kind of jury rig something, but it's really difficult, error prone and easy to game socially. I work in the travel industry at the moment and even something as simple as being able to flag that a former salesperson no longer works for the company would be huge.