Editing Nexus P2P trust network (section)

=== References ===
If I leave a negative reference to someone, how can I be sure that it will be displayed on this person's profile? And, how can you prevent anonymous people from leaving fake negative references?

''A universal problem with P2P networks is that there is no guarantee that all records corresponding to a key will be found on any given attempt, especially when first connected when the DHT is only partially filled. (P2P file sharing networks take a few minutes to get up to speed). Redundancy does a lot to offset this weakness. The reliability is quite high, but not perfect. The positive side is that there is no censoring possible.''

I think the magic needs to happen at the moment that the profile is rendered: The system will have some rules to find those references that are relevant to the visitor, and then decorate the social network profile with this additional information.

''Yes, there needs to be an algorithm that gives more weight to references by those you highly trust, somewhat less weight to references by friends of those you highly trust and so on. A reference by someone with whom there is no prior trust relationship would carry little or no weight. There are [[trust metrics]] already well-established that take into account the various paths of trust between two entities.''

''I imagined that the result of a search would be a list of candidates (along with perhaps a thumbprint picture that could be part of the identity record or obtained from the profile), a link to the profile, and a trust ranking, and maybe a display of trust paths to this person. Clicking on a link would render a profile in a browser and as you say some magic might be needed to embed the trust info into the rendering.''

''Typically, the results of a P2P search are displayed as they come in over some seconds or minutes. Visually on the display, that would correspond to a growing list of entities, with possibly changing values of the trust measures as the results come in. This is not like what people are used to from a central database, and is one of the reasons why P2P networks have limited popularity. Anything we can do to improve on this would help popularity.''
: I imagine that aggregation services will spring up for that purpose, similar to the search engines mentioned above. They will be powered by central servers and thus not be truly P2P, but at least they don't own your data.

This means: Either the social network where you created your account needs to be aware of Nexus, or you need to view the profile information through another service that adds the Nexus information - which can be a Firefox extension, or a website.

''It might be possible to handle the rendering within the Nexus platform. (Java is known for it's vast range of libraries. There must be a rendering engine. Java can do almost anything.) Or, Nexus can fetch the html page, modify it, and then pipe it to the browser in some way. This would be a nice little piece of magic.''
: Please keep in mind that this should work in internet cafés!

There could be "reference realms", their purpose being to decide which references are relevant and which are not. In addition, these entities could offer services similar to couchsurfing's MDST. The difference being that you can switch to a different reference realm if you feel they do a bad job.

''Possibly, a whole digital eco-system could spring up around this. That's fine with me. I like your concept of competing reference realms. I used to study genetic algorithms, and it's amazing what self-organized complexity that can spontaneously occur if you create the right kind of framework for that to happen. Incidentally, from the beginning we've kept the possibility in mind that this trust network could grow beyond hospex into bartering, etc.; anything requiring trust.'' 

''Great thoughts. Thanks!''