have you thought about a way i could deposit 1000 satoshis to your profile and make it visible for all to see that i endorse you as legit? i.e. if you know of my npub being the real me one can be more certain your account is the real you
Discussion
I haven't, I will now. I think I saw proposals for such endorsements at the protocol level somewhere (although w/o sats), can't find it now.
LinkedIn does something similar I believe, have you used their thing? I haven't myself.
Interesting idea, but… That will lead to:
1) The opinions of the rich will count more than everyone else's because they can give other people the most sats.
2) Circle jerk schemes where you give me 10,000 sats and I give you 10,000 sats - which comes out meaning nothing and is a scheme that can be used by scammers to make themselves look legit.
(Sorry for being pessimistic.)
Better, IMHO, is unpaid endorsements/testimonials… "I've known Joe for over 10 years - he's one of my dearest friends". It could be its own event type and could be ordered by whether you follow the person. One industry board I'm on has this and it's great. When you see obviously legit people endorsing the person it gives you confidence in interacting with them.
I agree w/ 1) and 2). However, nothing with unpaid endorsements makes them different - LinkedIn is a place where we can exchange (meaningless?) unpaid endorsements as long as we don't compete w/ each other too much.
That's why PageRank worked on the web - it is very robust to this kind of abuse. If you gave away as much 'weight/sats/etc' as you gained, then you're where you started. Only an asymmetry in the final weight distribution will show who is actually more popular, not a plain count of local events/links, which are easy to fake.
Yeah that sounds like a search engine I would actually use.
also, don’t forget that PageRank has “trusted setup“. you can’t provide relative ranking of everything compared to everything else without telling the system which is doing the calculation what good looks like. everything is relative. stanford.edu was a trusted domain from which the Google crawl began. could probably borrow the concept of ”trusted people” from which the graph of trust is computed based on sats weighted follow edges
It's important to be able to filter the abuse. If zap-endorsements are easy to fake then I don't think they'd work for the seed at scale.
With nip05 that's more or less trivial - you see a bunch of spammers all from the same domain, and you blacklist it. From experience, even some root zones will have to be blacklisted. How things evolve around zaps is unclear for me now, so we'll see.