Re: Payments and Trust

On 23 September 2012 18:40, Andrew Miller <amiller@cs.ucf.edu> wrote:

> The relationship between Trust, the Web, and Payments is profound and
> deep, and Ripple is the clearest expression of this idea. The
> important thing to realize is that trust is inherently a weblike
> structure. Trust is subjective and indirect. I'm going to describe the
> general structure of the social graph, and explain how you get
> different forms by choosing the semantics of the edges.
>
> Consider a family of directed weighted graphs sharing the same nodes,
> where each node represents a persona - either a 'real identity' or a
> pseudonym. Since the graphs share the same nodes, they differ only by
> the edges. So by a 'family of graphs', I mean that each graph is like
> an overlay of links between the same set of nodes. In each case, an
> edge between a pair of personas represents some kind of direct
> relationship between the two. Given one of these graphs, and a pair of
> nodes/personas, what we are usually interested is observing a 'flow'
> of some kind, the sum of all weighted paths from A to B.
>
> In one overlay, each edge represents a credit line, where the weight
> is the credit limit. The flow from one person to another represents
> the total available credit to use as a payment. In another overlay,
> each edge represents an 'outstanding balance', or a debt - credit
> limits that have been exercised. These two overlays together are
> Ripple, which allows payment through indirect credit on a web. Also
> see "Liquidity in Credit Networks" http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0515
>
> In another overlay, each edge represents that one person has
> diligently validated the identity of another. In another overlay, each
> edge represents an assessment that a persona is trustworthy to perform
> such diligent checks. These two overlays together are the PGP web of
> trust, which is useful for validating identities with no central
> administration.
>
> In a slight variation of this, the edges represent trust in the
> responsible trading behavior of each person. Now we are talking about
> a reputation graph like Bitcoin-OTC. For an illustration, see
>
> http://serajewelks.bitcoin-otc.com/trustgraph.php?source=nanotube&dest=amiller
>
> In another overlay, each edge represents an 'insurance bond' where one
> person vouches for the other. The flow from A to B represents the
> amount of insurance payout that A could collect if B misbehaves. This
> graph is TrustDavis.
> http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~defigued/index_files/trustdavis.pdf
>

Thanks for sharing.  Really like this, I've added it to a wiki page I
started at ...

http://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/Trust


>
> Do you see that these are all inherently the same kind of weblike
> structure? It's disappointing that OpenTabs, for example, scopes
> itself out of the potential to express indirect relationships, since
> the credits are strictly limited to the two people who initially
> interacted with each other. As another example, eBay has a seller
> reputation, but it is global rather than weblike, and therefore also
> cannot express indirect trust. Bicoin-OTC is weblike, eBay ratings are
> not. Ripple is weblike, OpenTabs is not. Let us build more weblike
> things!
>

Yes absolutely.  So the web was designed to annotate nodes and edges.  The
end goal of the web is not the 'web of documents' that we see today.  It's
'everything connected to everything'.  The way we do that is by naming the
nodes and linking them, then adding data points.

It's generic framework for annotating so can be extended any way we want,
it's simply a case of adding the terms and building the software around it.

I read this quote from Linus Torvalds today:

"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data
structures and their relationships."

It's really true of what we're doing in this group, as opposed to those
that are building the software.  We want the data models to be solid and
extensible then a foundation of software can be built around it.  I've
realized that trust is inherent to financial transactions so we might just
have to build them together.

TrustDavis looks very interesting indeed, perhaps this is a way to build a
prototype and let it go viral ...


>
> On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Melvin Carvalho
> <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm starting to think more and more that payments and trust go hand in
> hand.
> >
> > This is especially true when you are establishing credit limits for
> issuing
> > new money.
> >
> > Has anyone had thoughts on this topic?
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Andrew Miller
>