On 20/01/13 09:40 AM, James A. Donald wrote:
> On 2013-01-16 10:17 AM, Liam Edwards-Playne wrote:
>> Good day to you all,
>>
>> I've recently devised a solution for decentralized P2P trust
>> networking which you might all be interested in. It relies on an
>> artificial reasoning suite called Subjective Logic to provide methods
>> for deducing transitive trust. I've written a short 2 page paper to
>> detail the protocol - http://4abf.net/static/2013/jan/trust4.pdf
>> I'll be happy to answer any questions and discuss any critiques.
>> Regards,
>> Liam (liamzebedee) Edwards-Playne
>>
>
> It is not obvious to me how this performs should Bob create a million
> sybils to say that Bob is good.
>
> The system is designed to support generic trust. What are we
> trusting? Are we trusting Bob to be truthful, trusting Bob to pay his
> debts, trusting Bob to wisely curate content? Each of these is subject
> to subtly different attacks.
>
> Any trust scheme has to manage information about the probability of a
> probability, or rather the probability distribution of a probability
> distribution, abstractions that are hard to grasp, and I had a
> particularly hard time grasping them when they were not anchored to the
> probability of any particular event.
One thing that bedevils such systems is a weak definition (or a complete
confusion) as to what "trust" means:
A naive approach would be to retrieve trust as it is needed,
receiving the latest trust information at the cost of inefficiency.
Indeed, such makes no sense. It is not possible to "retrieve trust" any
more than it is possible to download love, transmit units of fear, or
sell hunger.
This assumption that "trust" can be unitised is what underpins most
systems -- they create single data units which are moved around. This
is more because the designers are computer programmers, and to them,
everything is a datum.
If one challenges that assumption, that "trust" cannot be unitised itno
a tidy data structure, then we're back to the drawing board.
As intimated above, and perhaps in that paper, we instead want
statements. ”a node will provide the most correct responses” But an
analysis of the statements as they are applied to multiple nodes also
reveals that we need a much more sophisticated structure about those
statements. The statements can't be totally free.
Here's a simple test: what happens if the statement proves wrong? The
answer to that will define the system far more than how the units are
moved around.
iang
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