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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If they DON’T like the work, they have the option of destroying the letters they hold. You’d have to go back and get new letters from people for the entire destroyed chain. So it’s serious. You’re operating your own ransomware.
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How would you use this?
Instead of saying “I really want this job!” you’d say, “I want this job so much I’ll stake my entire TWIMC forest* on this application!”
* Set of To Whom It May Concern DAG trees
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You’d literally be staking your reputation. Or at least signing up for a very expensive reputation reconstruction failure mode. Including recommendations from dead people that may not be recoverable.
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You could robustify your reputation forest. If Bob thinks Alice may in future turn out to be a criminal, he stakes his gig with Charlie using both letters from Alice and Dan. That way if Alice goes to jail, her letter can be removed without orphaning the Charlie letter.
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Adding a link to my Internet of Migrants idea thread as a potential application of such a scheme.
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Woke up this AM with a weirdly well-formed idea: “Internet of Migrants” based on routing pack(et)s of 2-10 people point-to-point in humane, conflict-free way that uses an IP-like protocol between cities rather than visa regimes between nations (which suffers border buffer bloat).
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Explored facets of this for Street Maint. (an impersonal job/institution) where roads have agency via pre-paid wallets + smart contracts enforced through passive street condition surveys.
Maintenance is auto-bidded out to marketplace of smoothness crews.
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