[freenet-dev] Negative trust

[Ian Clarke]

By now we are all painfully aware of the very correct observation that 
there can be no reliably enforceable negative trust on the Internet. 
Unfortunately, those that insist on repeating this fact over and over 
again fail to see that even though negative trust cannot be enforced 
against someone determined to circumvent it, most users won't be 
motivated to go to such lengths, particularly when the benefits of 
doing-so are negligible, and so it is quite possible that ideas 
involving negative trust can be effective in practice.

So, to prevent future proposals relating to load-balancing being drowned 
out by screams of "negative trust won't work!", can we try to consider 
whether:

1) Given the difficulty of circumventing negative trust will users 
actually be bothered to do it?

2) Given the benefits of circumventing negative trust will users 
actually be bothered to do it?

In recent discussions relating to how we deal with the urgent problem of 
load balancing, the answer to both these questions is probably "no" - 
meaning that negative trust can "work", in the sense that it will 
probably help with load-balancing, even if it doesn't "work" in the 
sense that it is theoretically invulnerable to circumvention.

Ian.
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