This is actually one of my motivations for working on decentralized list curation. Using the example above with the list of people from the Nixon administration, imagine that the list has these two characteristics:
- the items on the list are not necessarily made public, adding greater privacy protection to the people on the list
- the list is curated by your web of trust, so you trust the list to be accurate despite the fact that you don’t know who’s on the list.
That would be a powerful thing, would it not?
This is one of the issues that makes web of trust such a challenging problem to solve.
Here’s a crazy idea: instead of a signature that proves Alice made some statement (could be a rating or whatever), have some system that utilizes a signature that proves [some user on this list of users] made the statement. Alice would be on the list but her privacy would be protected to some extent.
I presume there’s a way to do this cryptographically although I’ve not investigated how exactly to do it. ZKPs perhaps.
Example: the list could be a list of people who are part of the Nixon Administration. The statement could be one made by Deep Throat (Mark Felt) regarding Watergate. The digital signature would prove that someone in the administration made the statement, thereby removing the need for the world to trust the reporter (Carl Bernstein).
Or the list could be users who fit some demographic, and the statement could be a rating of some particular product marketed to that demographic, so Alice could provide useful info (possibly in exchange for some sats) while protecting her privacy (not perfectly, but pretty well).
There are ways a bad actor might try to abuse this which would be worthy of consideration. Not sure how significant that would be.
Yup. When it comes to nonconformists, societies need to know how to sort the wheat from the chaff. I’m hoping that the ability to crowdsource knowledge will ultimately be a powerful tool to that end.
Which is why I think it’s important to build tools that allow us to crowdsource lists. bc if we can crowdsource lists, then we can crowdsource any data structure.
nostr:npub1clk6vc9xhjp8q5cws262wuf2eh4zuvwupft03hy4ttqqnm7e0jrq3upup9
The societies that know how to harness their non conformists have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
Lists are powerful. Two lists are enough to specify a graph: one list for nodes, one for edges. And many (all?) data structures can be represented as graphs.
Would you consider bitcoin to be simple?
I’m my mind, the consensus rules are not exactly “simple”. And yet I don’t think it would be possible to simplify the consensus rules any more than they already are. Almost every shitcoin adds complexity. The existing consensus rules are maximally simplified. In a way, this defines another schelling point: simplest set of rules that still works to solve the byzantine generals problem.
bc complexity means greater attack surface area?
In DCoSL, the word “trust” refers to how much power you are willing to give to some other user to curate knowledge for you. It is highly contextual.
https://github.com/wds4/DCoSL/blob/main/dips/coreProtocol/09.md
Normies aren’t going to join nostr until we get web of trust working, and polish it enough that it allows them to do things that simply cannot be done on legacy platforms. Or can be done, but not as well. Better personalized content feeds, for example.
The concept of original sin means everyone is guilty. No one is innocent.
The concept of intersectionality + privilege means everyone is guilty. No one is innocent.
Two moral frameworks. Superficially different but deep down, the same.
Loose consensus is the phrase I use to describe how to settle questions like this one. We would like to use the same set of keys for the same list of properties for a note, so we need consensus, but we can’t enforce it centrally. There must always be space for those who disagree with the majority.
Luckily, web of trust is ideally suited for loose consensus. I bet that one day we’re going to wonder why we didn’t build it sooner. Luckily, nostr is a great tool for building WoT.
https://github.com/wds4/DCoSL/blob/main/glossary/looseConsensus.md
the global score = the king’s personal score
There is no global view.
https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot1-sf/blob/master/Principle-of-Relativity-for-WoT.md nostr:note12r5e094n5nsu7e5e22khyejz4grd252ts3x79d6l49dushdpg44q90l0f0
btw I have a feeling from your banner pic nostr:npub1s6ka82ar3g9tswkqhrwyf3j50eq7uttdnzplp9k8r59su8adxfnsjafz5h that we just might agree on the #1 and #2 movies of all time 😅
Yup. And only do the calculations that are most relevant. Your web of trust will help you to know which sources of information to include and exclude, which will help you to avoid wasting resources on low-yield calculations.
If nostr implements 2 scores like you mention (global and personal), the personal score will eventually eclipse the global score in power and importance. It’s something that can only be implemented properly in a decentralized system like nostr. Centralized systems are simply unable to provide personal scores for various reasons, which is why we’ve never seen their power unleashed.
A global score is nothing different than a particular personal score that is centered around whoever represents the community. eg when Google calculates PageRank scores for websites, it’s basically a system of “personal” scores, except that the only score we ever see is Larry Page’s (Google’s) “personal” score, and none of the rest of us ever get to see our personal scores. So the global score = Larry’s personal score. And in a broader sense, “global” score always = the “personal” score of an individual or entity.
I wrote years ago about personal vs global scores here:
https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot1-sf/blob/master/Principle-of-Relativity-for-WoT.md