[MUD-Dev] Distributed Trust system discussion

[bruce at puremagic.com]

There's a bit of discussion about distributed trust systems at

  http://www.advogato.org/article/261.html

--- quote ---
Advogato's trust system is centralized. The following is a
decentralized trust system based on ideas by raph (creator of
Advogato) and Zooko.

There is a single statement which many people want to evaluate the
truth of, but there is no single authority on.


Everyone has a belief level, in the range 0 to 1. They believe the
statement if their belief level is greater than 0. People manually
configure friends, giving them each a distrust level, ranging from 0
(believe everything they say) to 1 (don't trust at all), and also have
a personal belief level, which is based on evidence they have gathered
directly.

Each person then takes their own belief level, and each friend's
belief level minus distrust of that friend, and takes greatest of them
as their level of confidence. This is repeated until levels of
confidence stabilize.

While extremely simple, this technique has a number of nice features -

It scales to a huge degree

There is no single point of failure - fooling a single person might
fool some of their friends as well, but won't fool everyone.

There is no self-sustaining rumor problem - levels of belief don't
arbitrarily rise just because people add more friends.
-- end quote -- 

 - Bruce
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