I think we should think about social networks in this regard. Linkedin does
1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections and gives a "500+ connections" if
someone has over that amount, it also emphasises who a person is connected
to and whatnot. Ideally we would want to mimic these but in a
decentralised/federated/distributed type of manner.

Projects like Vole <http://vole.cc/> are fascinating. Incentives and game
theory all need to be taken into account, it's no accident why Facebook and
Linkedin and such have gotten as successful as they have, it's a result of
carefully designed incentive schemes and understanding of psychology.


On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Andrew Miller <amiller@???> wrote:

> > The best solution would be to set it up so that sufficiently recognized
> > individuals themselves become authorities, so you could be verified by
> > employers, friends, etc, but the challenge there is ensuring that a small
> > number of attackers can't create fake people who add an exponentially
> > growing number of people and start a sybil attack (this is VERY hard,
> since
> > the legitimate network itself needs to add an exponentially growing
> number
> > of users).
>
> 'Sufficient recognition', much like trust, is not a *global* quality,
> rather it is subjective. It's a pairwise property between people, not
> a global property of an individual. A family of people all recognize
> and distinguish each other, without needing to be recognized by any
> external authority. So the idea that an entity 'sufficiently
> recognizable by *some number* of people' should become an *authority*,
> implicitly to everyone, is unnecessary.
>
> Or to put it another way, your examples are missing a link, a third
> referent. How about "you could be verified by your friends, to their
> friends" or "you could be verified by your employer to the corporate
> organization of employers"?
>
> --
> Andrew Miller
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