Alex Audu wrote: > Ed, > > You made some interesting points which leads me to wonder if > we can define Trust in such a way that its parameters are verifiable, > then we can verify that it is transitive. In other words, if Jon gets > a dollar from Mike, and Jon can verify the parameters of the dollar, > then Jon doesn't care about the "trustworthyness" of Mike's source. > Or should he? Alex: We can define trust in many different ways and we can surely define it in a way that it is 100% transitive. The real question, however, is how should we define trust such that: (1) it corresponds to the concept of trust that we humans have developed/learned in thousands of years of history and commerce; and (2) it makes sense in terms of a communication protocol that is executed by machines and exchanges data with humans. In other words, trust is a word that is commonly applied to many situations and consequently has many shades of meaning. My work focuses on one precise set of coherent meanings: the concept of trust in the context of communication. More specifically, in the context of the engineering problem of Internet communications. At the same time, I believe that trust is needed in this context. We cannot just wave it off, or reduce it to authorization. If we do that, we end up where we are right now ;-) In the way I see it applied to solve the engineering problem of Internet communications[ 1, 2], trust is considered something essentially communicable, but with specific rules for its communication. The induction (communication) of trust in heterogeneous environments, from human to machine, machine to machine, and machine to human, needs also to be considered. This also serves to bring together many different threads that are discussed on and off-line, regularly. All the talk about the Net being edge controlled needs to be revised in some new framework. In short, the Internet does not really have a center or edges. It only has connection points, each of which can be connected to any other such connection point for the purpose of packet exchange. One reason that the Internet does not have an edge is that at any termination connector, it is possible to extend the Net beyond that point by relaying packets, or by relaying messages, via dial-up modem, FAX or channels. Finally, let me address the last part of your question. Why can't trust be something I hand over to someone, and that someone can hand over again to someone else? Because that is not how we learned to use trust -- i.e., that is not what we understand by trust in our social/economic behavior. Trust is earned. Trust is the result of a "slow" interaction, of a step-by-step build up, with multiple channels of information. The idea is that when trust develops between machines, or machines and humans, we should essentially have the same model as when trust develops between humans. In short, if we want "trust" to be a bridge between these worlds, we need a common model. Cheers, Ed Gerck [1] "Trust as Qualified Reliance on Information", published in The Cook Report on Internet, January 2002 (copy available upon request). [2] (draft paper) http://www.mcg.org.br/trustdef.htm