Shifting our Web of Trust With Zeronet Trust Rank

[caroasi]

A proper web of trust system increases reliability, comprehensibility, and general usefulness of the internet. Current internet service uses a "CA" (central certificate authority) systems to determine who and what is and isn't trustworthy. Zeronet is a decentralized peer-to-peer internet that is based on a web of trust. Zeronet replaces this with a Trust Rank personal peer evaluation where the individual has core responsibility to determine who is and isn't trustworthy, with this decision delegated to known people to determine trust of unknown people. Authority starts with each individual, and only then forms collectively.

A Trust Rank is created by each Zeronet participant. Participants delegate trust and control in ways that create a secure network generally by ranking who they trust from most to least. This trust can be general or detailed as to the kind of trust such as performance trust, technical topic trust of some kind, or another topic of trust. A participant then delegates authority to others based on that ranking to mark specific Zeronet data or unknown people as trusted or distrusted.

Trust networks are then further built by honor. Consensus begins by two trusted participants that also trust each other and share that either publicly or privately with others, forming trust groups. When a sufficient level of trust forms as trusted participants assign honor to people or information, the information is considered consensus-accepted.

Zeronet (ZNET) shifts focus from websites which have hidden backends to portals which generally have open-source distributed backends, and use the Trust Rank among other ways to filter content. On Zeronet, this Web of Trust is used to form a peer-to-peer web hosting system. The Data Negotiation Service to discretely forms a trusted perspective of contact information and internet traffic reports. A trusted perspective of organization and personal reputation and economic data if formed using the Public Settlement Network (PSN). A bias-reduced perspective of news and facts by the Public Content Network (PCN). Other key information including basic communications, open market exchange, and collaborative projects. This is all managed by a simple "cog" on the Zeronet App Store. A cog is basically a Zeronet-specific app, but with system-wide capabilities unlike with a browser extension.

Full description: zeronet.rainrd.org

[Ucy]

I believe a proper decentralized trust system should be trustless regardless of high trust of a participant....this means everything should always be reviewed, verified or proven right regardless of participant trust. Notwistanding, participant with high trust score (or contents with high review) should gain more visibility or be ranked higher. You could have a special homepage where only their contents or products appear, and a default homepage to show all contents/products regardless of trust but with visible trust score in users content or product page when clicked open. An option to filter out  bad trust users while leaving the positve, neutral and no trust users should be available on the default homepage

Again, contents or products must pass through evidence based, permissionless reviews for issues before they become more visible and creator/producer rewarded with trust point. The review method allows anyone to go through a content/product to see how right/good it is. Any proven issue is highlighted with proof why it's an issue, and this can also be challenged by anyone with evidence that counters the provided proof. High trust people may have final say on unresolved or highly contested reviews. Review ends once no actual issue is found.  Cumulative trust from reviews display on participants profiles

This method is compatible with Bitcoin/crypto principles.

[caroasi]

I believe a proper decentralized trust system should be trustless regardless of high trust of a participant....this means everything should always be reviewed, verified or proven right regardless of participant trust. Notwistanding, participant with high trust score (or contents with high review) should gain more visibility or be ranked higher. You could have a special homepage where only their contents or products appear, and a default homepage to show all contents/products regardless of trust but with visible trust score in users content or product page when clicked open. An option to filter out  bad trust users while leaving the positve, neutral and no trust users should be available on the default homepage

Again, contents or products must pass through evidence based, permissionless reviews for issues before they become more visible and creator/producer rewarded with trust point. The review method allows anyone to go through a content/product to see how right/good it is. Any proven issue is highlighted with proof why it's an issue, and this can also be challenged by anyone with evidence that counters the provided proof. High trust people may have final say on unresolved or highly contested reviews. Review ends once no actual issue is found.  Cumulative trust from reviews display on participants profiles

This method is compatible with Bitcoin/crypto principles.

Thanks for the comment. People don't have enough time to personally review every line of code for every single app and OS they are using, so truly zero trust and is just asking too much. Negative trust genuinely complicates things because high-trust people could mark low trust for other high-trust people. Yet, it does seem necessary for situations such as hacked systems or keys.

Another issue is that most people who are "reviewing code" are probably having AI software do some to most of the work. So it important that they note what system was used for that review. I'm much more concerned about automated updates as I look at that as the biggest online security threat. Can you imagine how many coders have indirect access to any given system via updates? Probably thousands. Just one major company that does updates, like Microsoft or Google, could have thousands of coders that have access to one system! And good luck reviewing that, its assembly code.

Yet, most people consider it somehow more trusted than the open-source code from individual coders even when they publish their name and code history, which is really the best you can ask for. For example, many such open-source wallets will set off anti-virus alerts even though it is only ONE single coder with access to that entire organization, which if they are a cybersecurity expert is the safest possible setup.

There are different kinds of trust, and you highlight one kind. However, it was brought up that actually cryptocurrency has a glaring hole that is largely unaddressed by today's systems - inheritence. A Zeronet app would actually be perfect for that system because it could use the Public Settlement Network (PSN) to automate or semi-automate the process of inheritance of digital assets. Of course smart contracts could also be used with some sort of scripting language for that purpose, but the Public Settlement Network (PSN) could be used for death certificates, wills, and the like. It would be a pretty big deal and I should add that to the Zeronet main document this year.