Well, look, the crowd is learning!
Hmmm, condescend much?
They can perform a level of filtering, of due diligence, of guidance, and of overall service that a protocol simply can't.
Many folks with investment experience out in the fiat world would likely reply that exchanges have no business whatsoever offering either "guidance" or "due diligence" or anything remotely related -- and that they should, instead, make it their business to provide the smoothly functioning underlying mechanics that everyone else needs to be able to count on. Admittedly, exchanges which make
that their business will also likely enforce sane listing criteria as part of ensuring the underlying mechanics really can work smoothly. But those criteria have little or nothing to do with trustworthiness or -- more importantly -- with whether something is a good investment or a poor investment. Rather, those criteria centre on
accountability.
You can not remove trust from the equation. Decentralized exchanges serve as automation of a protocol, not a magic bullet to protect people.
This is why people should be focusing on a better WoT, and better WoT integration into web-based services, etc.
Nor, however, is trust a magic bullet to protect people: on the contrary, "trust" as reflected by crude mechanisms like the WoT has almost nothing to do with separating good investments from bad. It is only the presence of
bona fide and well validated
negative trust which reveals anything whatsoever of relevance to the job of separating good investments from bad; the presence or absence of
positive trust tells us virtually nothing about the competence of an individual as a manager, entrepreneur or investor, or about the merits of any particular investment associated with them.
(The WoT is better understood as an attempt to solve the problems created by
conflating privacy and anonymity than as any direct indicator of investment quality.)
From the perspective of "smart money" investment capital flowing into Bitcoin, the WoT is singularly irrelevant. When VCs and angel investors fund projects, that capital comes into the Bitcoin economy because of the efforts of real, identifiable people, with known identities and real world accountability, people whose levels of competence can be directly assessed by the investors. That capital does not flow into a project because a pseudonymous and ultimately unaccountable would-be entrepreneur has 999 positive ratings on the WoT.
I guess what I'm really asking is, "Is there a way to specifically establish a level of trust for a given
issuer in a decentralized, quantifiable way?" How about a system similar to a consumer credit rating
or a DNB rating for a business? Does WoT really address this completely?
IMHO, not in the least (for the last of those three questions). But even if it could, "trust" as reflected by something like the WoT will never cut it from the perspective of an investor.
Suggesting otherwise might seem neat and tidy at first glance, but it's actually confusing the relatively
easier job of ensuring mechanical compliance with a set of requirements -- foremost among them, not running off with someone's coins -- with the ultimately much
harder job of separating the wheat from the chaff in a field of investment candidates.
With the relatively rare spectacular exception, the fiat world has the mechanical compliance part down pat. Very few people worry, for example, that the underwriters for this or that latest IPO are going to run off to Bermuda with everybody's money. And yet, people do in fact lose their shirts and their Bermuda shorts every single day as a result of making bad investments. If there were the sort of connection between the "trust" part and the "good investment" part that some might like you to believe in, we'd all be fiat zillionaires by now.
