[Freedombox-discuss] Web of Trust Questions

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 14 December 2011 12:55, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
> On 12/13/2011 06:16 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>> bitcoin otc WOT, which also combines with GPG, ,and thinking about
>> scaling it to the whole web : http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratings.php
>
> Someone into bitcoin-otc brought a proposal for scaling their "web of
> trust" up on sks-devel.  I didn't think it was very well specified or
> even particularly well thought-through.
>
> here's the thread:
>
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/sks-devel/2011-12/msg00010.html
>
> i remain quite dubious about supposedly general-purpose global "ranking"
> schemes.  They usually seem to me to be either under-specified or
> internally inconsistent.

Thanks for the pointer.

Agree it definitely needs work.  But if standardized in the right way
it could compliment other WOTs in a way that can really scale.

Arguably the biggest web of trust now is the facebook friends network,
though there are privacy issues there.  We need something that can go
viral like facebook, but maintain privacy and data freedom.

W3C has been interested in trust for 2 decades, indeed trust is the
ultimate goal in the WWW "layer cake", but it has yet to find a really
compelling solution.  Perhaps the bitcoin wot can be fleshed out a bit
more in 2012.

>
>        --dkg
>