Time and Trust

Full Title or Meme

Trust is built slowly over Time but often must be applied in very short, human time scales of under 2 seconds.

Context

In ancient times trust was built in an community where "everyone knew everyone". In a highly distributed world some other mechanism needs to be put into place to make the world work.

Epigrams

• “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” - Ernest Hemingway
• Trust can make complex things possible. The absence of trust can make simple things impossible.

Problems

• The DID and Trust-over-IP teams have tried to be a distributed trust fabric to replace the Web-of-Trust that was used by Phil Zimmermann in PGP. The first solution was to put every DID on a Blockchain that was distributed by cryptography. Typical read time for the crypto Blockchain was 10 seconds and write time 10 minuets. This worked for many web-based applications, but is not tolerable when it blocks a human response by more that about 2 seconds.

Solutions

• Web of Trust or Social Graph showing who else trust a new entity.
• Device Identifier Composition Engine (DICE)