Re: Novel Social Primitives - I've been reading up on econ because of crypto, and came across E Ostrom's writing about Polycentricity, which seems extremely valuable to the Centralized vs. Decentralized conversation (hint: it's never 0.0 or 1.0 on that scale).
Before DevOps was fully a thing, a coworker and I sketched out a (too-complicated) service-discovery/bootstrapping program using DNS + PGP, and what we thought was a super-clever signing scheme for trusting automatically-spawned processes from our central platform tool. (Turns out, there are better ways)
The ability to build trust a la PGP Key Signing Parties, but at scale - and use them in a polycentric way could change a lot of things for the better.
For example, instead of ever giving out my IlluminatiFreedomCoin address that's tied to my SSN, I could produce a Venn diagram of users who have signed my keys for FB, Twitter, HN, etc. to suggest that I am who I say I am. Not foolproof, but probably sufficient to add a user account or keep a Craigslist deal moving forward, until I can authenticate IRL.
Before DevOps was fully a thing, a coworker and I sketched out a (too-complicated) service-discovery/bootstrapping program using DNS + PGP, and what we thought was a super-clever signing scheme for trusting automatically-spawned processes from our central platform tool. (Turns out, there are better ways)
The ability to build trust a la PGP Key Signing Parties, but at scale - and use them in a polycentric way could change a lot of things for the better.
For example, instead of ever giving out my IlluminatiFreedomCoin address that's tied to my SSN, I could produce a Venn diagram of users who have signed my keys for FB, Twitter, HN, etc. to suggest that I am who I say I am. Not foolproof, but probably sufficient to add a user account or keep a Craigslist deal moving forward, until I can authenticate IRL.