Distributed Trust Design

We now have the ability to create trust with software, as shown by Ebay, AirBnB, and Uber. Delft University of Technology is home to the oldest research group creating online trust at scale with real people. A total of 1.8 million people have installed our Tribler software over the years. It offers a Youtube-like experience with Bittorrent support, Tor-like anonymous tunnels, and our own bandwidth token economy. In August 2007 we launched a primitive distributed ledger together with Harvard University for "bandwidth-as-a-currency". It provides an incentive to donate seeding bandwidth or Tor-like relays. We have expanded upon this initial operational system ever since. Our system is based on trust, instead of crypto puzzles. Our IETF standard outlines "Trustchain" in detail. Trust and trustworthy identities are essential. We worked for years on the problem of fake identities and we will go live with the first government-backed self-sovereign identity after the summer. We want to generalize the various isolated profit-driven communities which try to build trust, to form a public utility. Our audacious ambition is to establish a new scientific field, we call Distributed Trust Design. Distributed Trust Design provides a coherent framework to transform mutually non-trusting people into trustworthy online communities of arbitrary size, that have a process for democratic decision-making, the ability to punish those who freeride on the community or are dishonest in order to manage a marketplace, govern a resource sustainably, schedule activities, or achieve a common purpose in general.