Ok. What is the system being used in all of this that indicates who matters? The only entity management in all this appears to be Freenode's NickServ, userprofileID / name on this forum, and a handful of strange startup stock markets. Is it a personal case-by-case judgement? If so, that's ok; but if there is another system being worked on I'd like to hear about it. To use.
My point stands about the entry by MoscowR earlier, if that works the way it appears if I trusted MoscowR (and maybe filtered out all feedback from non-trusted reviewers) I would think that this user was vouched. Can he change that entry on his own or....?
See, this is the thing, people dissing the WoT don't really know how it works. So:
I. The only way to enter ratings is being registered with gribble. The only way to register with gribble is to answer a cryptographic challenge it issues, and the only way to do that is to hold the secret key for the respective gnupg keypair. Therefore, the only person that can use a name is the person that holds the specified keypair (on the page of that name you have a link anchored on "GPG identity"). This identification is as strong as Bitcoin itself, and that's why it makes for such a good solution.
II. The WoT is really an investment. It is slow to start off, but becomes exponentially more useful with your usage. At first you don't know anyone, so in principle it's difficult to make any judgments. Maybe you might know some of the names there, from other venues, and you can establish relations by talking to them, and in that case also acquire at least part of their trust list. Maybe you don't, in which case you start small, try to hedge your bets. You look to see who your op is being trusted by and who they trust. After you've made a few deals, you've started to recognize the names, you start giving them weight in your head.
III. The mistakes you can make are principally to think "trust" can be added, and so someone who received 50 trust brownies is more trustworthy and someone who received 5 trust brownies is less trustworthy. This is wrong (the trust points are not at all equal), and not the correct way to use that value.
The value only gives some indication of
how likely you are to know someone who knows them. That is all. A user with 100 trust is about 10 times more likely to be trusted by someone you know than a user with 10 trust for the very simple statistical reason that you need at least 10 people to get 100 trust. This is the correct use of total trust: to compare the list of how many people you trust that rated the person with how large his trust is. A user with 100+ trust that you can't find was trusted by anyone in your list is
suspect for this reason. Sure, it may be the case that he trades widgets and you trade nuggets, and he only knows people in the widget market and you only know people in the nugget market. But it's also possible that he's faked his trust. You have to decide which.
This is the great boon of the WoT: surely for sporadic deals in the 10-100 dollar range entered in among people that will never meet again something like Amazon Ratings works just fine. However, the WoT currently supports recurring deals among players with multi-million dollar balances of trade. That's quite a gap there, and half-baked systems like Amazon's don't scale. How is this possible? Well, it's possible precisely because the WoT is so fine and so interpretable. You want to deal with someone you've never met but has a high sum rating? Ok, are any people you know in his list? Ok, who? Then you can talk to them, and ask "what about X?" and they'll tell you what they did, bought coins, sold a motorboat, lent them $150k of mining gear, whatever. Sure, all this complex reasoning might seem like it's not worth it at the beginning. However, unlike any alternative it actually allows you
a lot of space to grow.
Now, the only seeming breach to date was pirate's, who managed to get the trust of the vast majority of trusted people over the course of about a year. But the thing is, the
WoT isn't intended to decide whether a person is trustworthy. Only you can decide that. The WoT is there to put the person in context, to make them visible to you. It was plain impossible for anyone using the WoT to not know
what pirate was all about. Now, once knowing that, if you trusted him or not is your problem, not really the WoT's. All the WoT says is, hey, there's this guy, 58 people know him, have dealt with him, received money so and so. Put that together with the knowledge that he runs a "mysterious business" paying 3000% APR and you've got your answer plain.
In short for the tl;dr crowd: the WoT doesn't work by itself. The WoT is just the tool that allows you to do the work, and it's by a fat margin the best tool to date. Sure, you may be too lazy to use the tool, and that's fine. Doesn't however change what it is.
