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Reasonable Horses's avatar

Multiple likes! “Peer-to-peer trust scores” is an elegantly practical measure. My pipe dream is to create more trustworthy citizens, but outing and penalizing the untrustworthy incentivizes trustworthiness. Solve the problems of recidivism and entropy, and poop emojis will become obsolete.

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Arjun's avatar

In MapleStory, an MMORPG I used to play, there was a thing called "Fame". You had one Fame (Defame) point to give to another player per 24 hour period. The idea is basically the trust token. Many people used have you Fame when you did something nice, or Defamed you when you were being an asshole.

The majority of Fame points, however, were from trading Fame. If I were bored, I could stand around in the market saying "Trading Fame" and make a mutually beneficial Fame transaction in no time. (Of course, there was an inherent quality of trust involved, because whoever gave Fame first had no way of forcing the other player to return the favor).

Fame Farming. It made the Fame system not fulfill it's intended purpose. Some people made a joke of it and got as much negative Fame as possible.

People will find ways to do Trust Token Farming IRL, since it would provide massive personal and societal benefit. Politicians already do this, to some extent. In a hardcoded system, someone can Trust Farm and point to his extremely high trust score when running a scam.

Well if you say, "it's on public ledger, so people can verify it," we have the same problem as now, which you identify:

> If it were on a transparent blockchain ledger, there would be an irrefutable way to verify it, but most people don't want to invest that much time.

Especially if the person doing the verification has a low Trust Score, made possibly by the political machine's cronies.

So, the Trust Token concept is interesting, but attaching it to People has shortcomings.

What if you attached Trust Token to information?

Say, an article about How to Cure Type 2 Diabetes in 6 weeks.

Andy has been struggling with T2D for 15 years. His doctors got him on a strict weekly regimen and diet. Technology has improved so the injections hurt less, but it's still a really shitty situation. He just got a SlaveStyle Libre Bluetooth monitor thing on his arm that beeps when sugar problem.

He stumbles across the article on Truststack, written by DiaBeast79, with thousands of positive Trust Tokens and comments saying, "worked great"/"saved my life and my house"/"I'm free, never going back to the Dr."/etc.

His brain is skeptical, and his doctor advises against it, but hey, 6 weeks? He gives it a shot.

Turns out it works great. In 4 weeks, Andy is able to stop his medications, has lost 10 pounds, and has a new lease on life.

How Doctor, dumbfounded, deep researches and makes new [to him] discoveries, and starts recommending the article to his other patients with similar problem.

He returns to the article, pays $100 [required] to give it a Trust Diamond, and writes a glowing review. He wants it to help others, and is happy to pay, since he's saving thousands per year on medication and insurance.

The article, having provided real value, now ranks higher on Truststack, gets recommend more to people who might have T2D, and supports the author.

The value in the article is in the substance of it, not who wrote it. The writer, DiaBeast79, could have a very negative Trust score, could even be Hitler; that's irrelevant. He could even have written an article about How to Handle Art School Rejection that worked for nobody, is totally useless, and doesn't even show up on Truststack anymore.

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Anyway, the concept of Trust Tokens is of good intent. You want to be able to know whether someone is trustworthy or not, depending on the context. A general Trust Token system is too general and too easy to game or have it go awry. 3, 5 are better for Personal Trust situations, least likely to be corrupted, I think.

I would always want the option to be anonymous online. Sometimes in person. Depends on the scenario. Identity is important in some places and not in others.

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