

Webs of Trust and How To Decentralize Them (Bitcoin) - kiba
http://www.bitcoinweekly.com/articles/webs-of-trust-and-how-to-decentralize-them

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tptacek
17 of this person's ~20 submissions from the last year have been about
Bitcoin, many (like this one) from "Bitcoinweekly", a site the submitter
actually runs.

A bad thing? I dunno. Just, maybe I think worth noting.

'kiba, you said earlier, "I hope I'm not being spammy". Maybe start to worry
about this a bit more now.

~~~
composer
kiba, if by "spammy" you mean continuing to call for focus of the hack-space's
collective intelligence on one of its most fundamental problems... then spam
on brother... spam on.

------
composer
Wow. The article is significant because it identifies and proposes a solution
to a fundamental problem everyone has (even if they don't recognize it yet).
Craig Newmark concurs with the poster per a gigaom interview. "Newmark called
some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps” for the
web over the next decade" ([http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/craig-newmark-on-the-
webs-next-...](http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/craig-newmark-on-the-webs-next-
big-problem)).

A giant multidimensional karma score, a peer-based FICO score for reputation,
a PKI-like vouch system, an Advogato-like acceptance scheme to cover all
internet activity solves so many things.

\- Know who to trust on craigslist, airbnb, etc. \- Astroturfing/trolling
disappears on your favorite political forum. \- Gamed ratings disappear from
your favorite music discovery site. \- Online referendums, with the assurance
of only one account per unique person, are possible. \- Promotional online
giveaways with a one per person limit become easy. \- Gone are account
verification hoops like sms codes to a required cel phone. \- The usefulness
of consumer complaint boards is restored. \- Trolls may finally become a
relics of some ancient internet past. \- Amazon-turk inflated rankings no
longer can mislead ebay buyers.

Bitcoin solving it's own local problem may very well fix everything else on
the intarwebs.

I would expand on the posters call for "decentralized peripherals: a
decentralized exchange, a decentralized DNS, Namecoin, and also a
decentralized web of trust." Open source R&D, with decentralized governance
and distributed funding by the crowd, is what should be powering all this.

Hackers should crowd-fund a collectively beholden R&D outfit that churns out
solutions for fundamental things like reputation and decentralized
peripherals. Right now such a role is played out haphazardly?, incidentally by
matured startups that donate or "give back" according to their narrow focus
some other narrowly focused institution. A wider more comprehensive, more
coherent approach is achieved when hackers cut out the middle steps and self-
organize to solve the fundamental problems they face everyday. Open source
R&D... what should we call it?

