Building a Network of Trust

To most people, the integrants of the block chain is just a huge list of anonymous addresses. We need to connect them with trust. This is a valuable currency that we can receive, and lose nothing by giving trust. However, it is something that we cannot give to everyone. We must know who we are trusting. We expect that people can understand this and be mindful of who to give their trust tokens. Also, trust needs to be able to be revoked anytime by the issuer.

If Alice trusts in Bob and Bob trusts in Charlie, then it will be easier for Alice to trust Charlie for future negotiations. This aims to build long-term relationships with people in the Cardano network, thus incentivizing an infinite prisoner's dilemma context (https://athu3385.medium.com/the-infinite-prisoners-dilemma-e04ed842fe6), which is more favorable in a self-governance environment.

This is not something new, as we can see this concept of decentralized trust as an alternative to the centralized trust model as shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

I want to integrate these concepts of trust and build self-governance in the blockchain.

The main objectives are:

1. create ways to mint tokens of trust and create plutus scripts that associate these tokens with trusted addresses. This will build a relation of trust with someone. This can be a one-way relationship or a two-way relationship, where one trusts the other;

2. be able to navigate in one's own network of trust. This means mainly two things:

a. be able to securely and anonymously share personal data to people the user gave trust,

b. able to see if a given address is trusted by someone the user trusts;

c. the possibility of a social network based on these connections;

3. the number of people trusted by someone and vice-versa should not be of relevance. What should be relevant is if someone is trusted by who I trust. Numbers should not matter - degrees of proximity should;

4. incentivize relationships between trusted peers. This means negotiations but also long-term partnerships, like DAOs, provision of services and connections between small agricultural farmers and the population nearby;

5. make a system that does not weight information about race, sex, country of origin, religion or political ideology, and weights people who are reliable and keep their word;

6. make only open source code.

The (paid) project development is thought to be done in 12 months. The philosophy of the project will be to Keep It Simple™.

The three month goals are listed next.

There will be one month for planning of the solution. There are three main fronts for delivering the solution, and we will structure our plan as follows after the first month:

1. Contract tasks:

In the following two months, the team will start by building the smart contracts and a general structure for the policy script for minting trust tokens, which will by itself be a simple token in an UTXO that will be used in transactions between trusted peers. These tokens of a specific address will be queried using Blockfrost, to make a graph of trust of a given address. Token metadata will point to trusted addresses. Everything will be usable by the community in the testnet.

2. Back-end tasks:

In the following two months, the team will understand how to use cardano-node and Blockfrost to build an application capable of building graphs and working with token metadata and encryption to build an application. 

3. Front-end tasks:

In the following two months, the team will build a simple interface that will show graphs and relevant data. Also, the team will study integration with Yoroi and Nami wallet, and cardano-cli.

For the six month goals, we have:

1. Contract tasks:

In the fourth and fifth months, the team will implement asymmetric cryptography to token metadata information. Possible attacks will be studied and solutions proposed, at the eyes of the open source community.

The sixth month will be of refining of structure of policy scripts and contracts.

2. Back-end tasks:

The fourth month will be to build the algorithms to search and construct graphs based on cardano addresses.

The fifth and sixth months will be to integrate the application with the front-end.

3. Front-end tasks:

In the fourth and fifth months, the team will work with the wallets to send smart contract transactions, possibly using JavaScript and cardano-serialization-lib, or directly with cardano-node. Only basic social media concepts will be implemented at first. Everything will be hosted on the client.

In the sixth month, the team will work on integration with back-end applications.

After these tasks are done, there will be continuous improvement based on community feedback, planned for the remaining six months. Everything done will be open sourced with Apache license and will be used for future projects.

After 12 months, we plan to have a basic but functional application that works with smart contracts and the blockchain to build and visualize a network of trust.

This project can be considered a social experiment, and everything can be tested in the testnet, with help of cardano community in Discord channels and github community. Everything developed will count as learning how we can build stronger relationships between people in Blockchain community.

I want to pay 500 USD per month for one year for everyone in the project.

I already have contact with many software developers and mathematicians, some familiar with Haskell. I want to incentivize the whole team to learn Haskell development.