This is why blockchain was/remains exciting. It feels like part of the solution. The robustness of personal institutions with the scale and openness of impersonal ones.
Conversation
The problem is that legibilizing trust enough to make it transitive may be an AI complete 🤔
When Alice says, “I trust Bob” to Charlie, the only way to capture the promise being made is to include a model of Alice in any new Bob-Charlie relationship definition.
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If something gets screwed up, Alice-bot is part of the arbitration and any consequences backpropagate to Alice, I think 🤔
It’s a sort of expanding entanglement of risk exposures. A growing Gordian knot of community and mutuality. All are complicit in everything.
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Impersonal institutions are a kind of cutting of the Gordian knot. A finite whitelist certification. “Bob got an A+ in Calculus 101”. Alice can only be held accountable for inferences made directly from that specific endorsement assertion which only captures a piece of trust.
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In practice the embodiment of interpersonal trust that travels the farthest is still the good old recommendation letter. A simple, untargeted, but dated and personally backed block of text. Surprisingly nothing invented since quite disrupts it.
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“To whom it may concern” may be the most powerful 5 words in the world. Alice is standing behind an arbitrary block of text concerning Bob in undefined future contexts in relation to arbitrary counter parties. A verifiable currency token with only 1 unit in circulation.
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Hmm. Idea for a personal currency: collect digitally signed to-whom-it-may-concern open recommendation letters from friends, colleagues etc. Maybe with expiry dates or revocation capacity. Maybe you have a stash of a hundred.
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Then (and this is the clever bit) sign a few over to new people you need to have trust you while you’re working with them. They return them when relationship is done. If they like the work, they issue you their recommendation letters citing the ones they held.
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So old letters get more valuable as new letters blockchain on. You use them for more important things. It’s a secure currency because they are only useful in relation to working with you. You can stake a few letters or many, leaf-letters or roots of long chains.
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This seems backward. Trust should decay as time passes or with each transitive degree.
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The trick is each new reco building on top of an old one implicitly updates and builds on it. If I get a programming job with you based on letter from last job, your letter says, effectively, “that other letter is still true and I have this to add”.

