You know me, I don't like to complain

commented.org – Commented.org – Intro to crypto-less assertions :

Cryptography is normally difficult to get right, and given a choice most people would rather not deal with it. For most assertions, the asserter and the recipient need to agree on a trusted third party.

In real life, when Bob tells you something, you may not be ready to accept it just yet. Perhaps you need Dave and Eric to state the same fact before you accept it. Or perhaps if Alice said it, you’d be fine with it and wouldn’t need to hear from someone else.

That’s how we do it in real life: we trust people to various degrees. Crypto-less assertions strive to get rid of the issues with current crypto-based assertions. The crypto-less assertions map onto a real life in providing a means for relative trust.

I find this entire notion completely fascinating. I’ve seen and read about similar trust-building and relationship-utilising methods of trusting things—but one of my biggest concerns would be how to privately retain that information so that people can’t see who I trust.

This is probably an easy problem to solve, so easy in fact that I’ll feel like a complete fool once Hans explains it to me.

Why is something like this interesting to you?

Because it builds reputation and trust. One of the greatest things about weblogs and the web in general is that there are billions of people publishing things. Know what the biggest problem is? There are billions of people publishing things. You don’t know if someone is on the level, or re-blogging someone else, or plagiarizing. You don’t know if someone is who they say they are, and maybe you don’t care.

But if you’re a publisher, you should. Your brand is you, and being able to protect and assert your identity in a way that is easy to use and understand makes all the difference. This is a very creative way to solve parts of that problem and I think it will be an interesting topic as it gets discussed more.