-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBMTO : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 13:48:00 -0700 From: Jim McCoy <mccoy@mad-scientist.com> Reply-To: mojonation-users@lists.sourceforge.net To: mojonation-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Mojonation-users] Collaboration and more decentralization inMojo Nation? Kannan Goundan at kannan@cats.ucsc.edu wrote:

I have two questions about the concept you guys are testing in Mojo Nation.

1) Can you build a "web of trust" so that you aren't dependant on your local blacklist of rogue brokers to protect yourself? Possibly a "blacklist server" that people could subscribe to that keeps track of all the punks that it's subscribers reported.

Yes, such a system could be implemented. The problem is that you need to somehow quantify this trust to allow the agents to make useful decisions based upon the information available to them. Zooko presented a paper at the last O'Reilly P2P conference on just such a subject, describing a variant of the distributed trust metric used by Advogato. The short answer to this is that there are a couple of known ways to deal with this problem but until it is really an issue it is not worth the time or effort to code in such a distributed trust system.

2) Is there any way to decentralize the token server?

Not really. You can have several competing token servers with various exchange rates offered but this is an even harder variant of the distributed trust problem described above. With the tokens the distributed trust metric starts talking about computational resources, which have some economic value. In this case we believe that eventually the trust would boil down to the same sorts of questions broker of currency face when making a trading decisions, with even less available information about the agents issuing the tokens that a currency trader has available. Agents would migrate towards one or two well-trusted issuers -- there is a reason that most banks around the world use dollars, euros, and yen as their reserve currency even if that is not the local currency... jim _______________________________________________ Mojonation-users mailing list Mojonation-users@lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mojonation-users