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.It wouldn't be so difficult if someone else had already gone through the trouble of creating and distributing SuperFreenet.jar.
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?Has anyone shown the benefits to cheating to be negligible? I think we have to take that on a case-by-case basis. In Tom's case, for example, IF (big IF) someone could create and use N IP addresses at the same time, the greedy user would get away with N times fewer QRs. Other uses of negative trust would have to be evaluated on their own merits.
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.
see above
-Martin
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