The "Decentralized ID" Merkle Root would become the anchor or the immutable peg for a certain WoT network, because networks are dynamic and I keep going back to thinking about the need of a timechain to anchor their legitimacy...
Discussion
it needs a consensus. doesn't have to be a blockchain database.
i'd like to refer you to the Stellar XLM shitcoin, and the Ripple XRP shitcoin. both of those are built with a consensus that in part uses web of trust. they might be shitcoins, but they are more secure than proof of stake.
with nostr, we have a network of databases that can be used to store consensus state, and help connect nodes in the consensus protocol. we have a social graph which is extremely rich in information, that can be used as part of the decision process to eliminate bullshit from poisoning the database.
i seem to be one of the few people on this protocol with even second year CS distributed systems theory. i guess it falls on me to demonstrate it because none of y'alls understand enough about it to get it, and hey, someone's gotta do it.
I just read up on the stellar consensus protocol (SCP).
Allow me to rephrase the basic idea with as little terminology as possible; tell me if this makes sense to you.
The basic idea is that if I want to answer an arbitrary question (which could be anything: is this a valid transaction? What’s the best coffee shop in Prague?) then I pose this question to my WoT, collect everyone’s answers, and select the winning answer based on the consensus of my WoT.
SCP is obviously a very specific application of the above basic idea. What if I want to apply this same idea to a completely different specific use case — like selecting the best coffee shop in Prague? How do I take the preceding paragraph and state it as precisely as possible but also in the most *general* terms as possible? This is the problem that I’ve been turning over in my head for over a decade.
We would need a well defined method to represent the space of “all possible questions” (or at least a very very large class of questions) as well as a well-defined method to answer any given question. What would be the primitives for this method? In my mind, decentralized lists and personalized, portable, contextual trust metrics are two of the most important primitives. Decentralized Lists is how we define a question (to ask: what’s the best coffee shop in Prague, you start by defining a decentralized list of coffee shops in Prague) and trust metrics is how we answer the question (as discussed in the NIP). If my WoT and your WoT and lots of people’s WoT converge on the same answer, we have a method that is not only widely generalizable, but more importantly one that is useful.