Webs of Trust and How To Decentralize Them (Bitcoin)

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.

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-...).

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?