A web of trust is an organically linked group of identities that can help to measure the trust of a specific endorsement.
Why Are Webs of Trust Important?
Who do you trust? That’s the question when you’re assessing an endorsement. Certainly, the fair witness methodology can help, but you still have to have trust that the attestor is using it fairly, impartially, and correctly. At some point, there needs to be some root ability to trust someone, even if their identity is entirely pseudonymous.
That root trust can come from a web of trust. Though an endorsement from someone you don’t know might have some faint value, an endorsement from someone you already know and trust will have much greater value. And, if a number of people you know all endorse a new identity, that “web of trust” will have even more value for you.
Though they create a web of trust, these are “peer-to-peer interactions”: a singular person endorses another. They are peers because neither is in a position of authority; instead the trust is decentralized. Only together do these singular endorsements begin to create a web.
Ultimately, this requires pseudonymous identity systems to build networking as a vital part of their system, even if it’s just the ability for one identity to sign endorsements about another identity.
How Do Webs of Trust Work?
The creation of Webs of Trust is simple: you create a way for one identifier to provably link to another identifier. Blockchain Commons’ XIDs do this with edges: one identifier is used to create and sign an attestation about another identifier, then the other identifier can choose to link it into their XID, which they can then sign before distribution. The simple act of signing keys with keys was the mechanic in PGP, the technology that founded the idea of a web of trust. Many other options are possibly, but the important thing is for links to be signed, so that they’re provable.
Blockchain Commons doesn’t currently have a methodology for assessing the level of trust generated by a web of trust. The traditional method is to give each trust link a value, and for that value to be higher if the attestor is directly linked to you and lower the further away they get. Summing up trust values from many different attestors can then reveal your level of personal trust, based on your web of connections.
Web of Trust Links
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