Fix the Internet with a Graph of Trust

6 points

7 years ago

The internet has a bad reputation with non tech users. People are afraid of fraud because it is so easy to put up a fake product websites. Some sites like trustpilot.com try to solve this with user reviews but these can also be faked easily. We need a system with Strong Identity to make fakes prohibitively expensive.

Imagine a Graph of Trust where a legitimate startup founder can create an ID based on references from their previous employers. The founder simply states their name and reference email addresses who can verify that they are indeed a real person who once had an employment contract. Then we need to define a global source of trust because your references could be fakes as well. For example take any company with a stock value > 1e6$ as "trusted". Then the trust of a founder (and hence his startup) is computed by the existence of a path from them to a source of trust. Its not perfect, email accounts inside big companies can be hacked. But it will make it much more costly to create a fake ID. And importantly this Graph of Trust will give us an audit trail to respond to instances of fraud.

If this existed and was an industry standard would you go through the trouble of creating an ID and linking this from your new landing page ?

If you think this is worth implementing let me know by signing up to the mailing list https://mailchi.mp/15da4d92c851/graph-of-trust-betalist