[mnet-devel] Grid Of Trust -- I'm back

[Zooko Ozoko]

> > I don't really believe in hashcash for attack resistance, since we want people 
> > with $50 handhelds to easily and conveniently connect to the network while being 
> > safe from people with $500,000,000,000 special-purpose computers.
> 
> I like to think of the perfect P2P net as a good civil society.  
> Everyone has rights.  
> The overwhelming majority supports those rights.
> This majority controls the majority of power like money, press, weapons, knowlege, ect.

It's an interesting issue of the assumptions that each of us has.  I tend to 
imagine that the majority is malign, or at least useless, and that my goal is 
to establish mutually beneficial cooperation among a small group of friends or 
conspirators in spite of this overpowering and malicious society.  This is a 
dramatically different kind of assumption than what you have!

I'm not saying that mine is better, nor even that it is applicable in more 
situations.  Probably each perspective is more useful in different situations.  
The concept of the civil society seems to be extremely valuable in certain 
real-life contexts right now, i.e. in developed Western nations, the World 
Wide Web circa 2003, etc., whereas the concept of the small-scale, secret, and 
highly defended conspiracy may be more useful in other times and places.

Again, I emphasize that I don't think your concept is a bad one.  I think your 
sort of idea underlays some of the p2p papers that I've been reading recently -- 
there's sometimes an assumption that the majority of the people, and the 
majority of the power, all basically agree with one another and want to 
cooperate with one another.

Regards,

Zooko



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