A Next Generation Internet Trust - project
- Context and goal of the project
- The Bitoftrust protocol
- How to get involved
- Some history on this project
Trust is an essential part of human interaction and relationships but is seldom made explicit. The world is full of trust and without it daily life would be nearly impossible and a very risky & frightening activity for all.
Also our digital lives are full of trust, in an even more complex way because of the intermediation by (invisible) technology providers.
Historically this question has always been solved with a major focus on concepts as security & privacy as building blocks of trust.
Resulting in a trend in which recently the very concept of what trust is, seem to be forgotten. The trust question gets mistaken or disguised as privacy or security questions. Although privacy and security could be very important aspects of trust, they are not trust itself and we need to keep that in mind.
When e.g. looking at the discussion on contact tracing apps during the Covid-19 crisis and the risk of them becoming surveillance apps, the underlying question is a question of trust. But almost immediately such question gets rephrased by society as a privacy and/or security question without looking at the trust question itself first.
This has even gone so far that society has started to embrace a technology, named blockchain, that seem to claim that trust is not even needed anymore. We, with Bitoftrust, say this is a false and even dangerous claim.
Blockchain offers distributed cryptographic trust but doesn't address the issue of Human Trust. To the contrary it is built on foundations of mutual mistrust
Trust is always needed for any interaction (human trust intermediated by the technology you use: trust in the chain distributed between the miners, trust in protocols, trust in your operating system, trust in your app provider, ...).
We want to open the debate on this by starting to look again at trust itself but not from the traditional perspective of security & privacy but from the perspective of what trust is really about:
If Blockchain was about trust-minimisation, BitofTrust is about trust-maximisation, where trust precedes mistrust.
We want to build a world that not only has doors with keys and locks to protect our privacy but is constructed in the first place to encourage openess and intimacy towards eachother as important factors to be able to build trust.
Abandon the false claim that cryptographic privacy & security could mimic a human level of privacy and embrace the fact that a digital world requires a new sort of intimacy with the technology we use.
With help of funding from NGI Trust, an European Union's Horizon 2020 research & innovation programme, we want to create a protocol that will result in identifiers of trust and intimate relationships in the digital world.
Trust between humans, between machines and between human and machines.
During Open Summer of Code 2020 we will work on a POC to demonstrate how this would work. You can see the roadmap & follow the progress via: bitoftrust.io
Our project-site is bitoftrust.io where you can find information on progress, links to events & all official communications we publish.
If you want to contribute to the protocol, you can find us here on github, we welcome any input and work totally in the open for the public good under MIT licence.
Get in contact via our projectsite if you would have any other questions or collaboration proposals.
The projectsite itself uses the Hugo template Academic and is hosted via Netlify. If you see anything you would like to change, you can open an issue or pull request here in the github repository or directly by the editing option at the bottom of each post .
The idea of Bitoftrust was a first time mentioned, by Serge Ravet in a 2015 blogpost: #Openbadges + #Blockchains = #BitofTrust? and has gone through several iterations since.
A turning point was late 2018 / early 2019 when we fully realised that blockchain is a wrong solution to our trust problem.
This resulted in a green paper that you can find here.
Today, this NGI funded project hosted on bitoftrust.io is a first real try to put the ideas of Bitoftrust in a working protocol and POC.