Hi David,

>Given that CAs have CPs and CPSs to document how trustworthy their
>procedures are, and have audits to validate that they abide by them, I
>said that TRs would need to do something similar, but this went down
>like a lead balloon and was not something that people wanted to hear.

FWIW I agree entirely that this will often be necessary. Indeed, that's a
large part of the point of Moonshot's communities: to draw the boundaries
where these kinds of procedures and so forth apply. I don't recall the
discussion itself that you allude to, but perhaps this rejected in the
specific context of the pilot where an overly prescriptive approach might
deter participation.

>As
>Joss's reply indicates, I think he wants to keep trust at the buddy
>level, between friends who know and trust each other, and of course this
>works well for small closed communities.

Not at all! The goal is to scale from the smallest to the largest
communities.

> But it wont work for large
>disparate communities where relationships are more tenuous and many
>transitive trust links are needed, and it certainly wont work at a
>global Internet scale.

You can scale trust in two ways: transitively, as you suggest, to reach a
large number of peers through intermediaries; or promiscuously with a
large number of direct connections to your peers. The strategy you end up
picking is effectively a trade-off between the marginal cost of each
additional connection (whether to a peer or intermediary) and the quality
of trust arising from this connectivity. There is no right or wrong
answer: it simply depends on your needs and what you can afford to do.

By analogy, consider how Google connects to the Internet. It doesn't have
a single pipe to a single ISP for Internet transit, as you or I might have
at home. Instead it buys connectivity to pretty much every Internet
Exchange on the planet, peering with whomever it makes sense, to get as
near to its users as possible to optimise their connectivity to its
servers. It will deliberately seek to avoid using Internet transit
providers, and only use it if all else fails. I believe that we will
observe a very similar pattern for trust router networks.

Josh.



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