Trust

Every verified participant holds 100 trust allocations — a continuous budget you distribute across people and topics. "I trust Alice on photography", "I trust Bob on identity-verification". Trust on climate science doesn't make you trusted on software security. Re-allocating simply publishes a new envelope — a signed record — that supersedes the old one once it matures.

Attestation power is the weight your signal carries across the network. Square root means distributed trust beats concentrated trust. Ten people giving 10 points each produces more power than one person giving 100.

Writing "I trust Alice" isn't enough. For a trust allocation to become recognized by the network, two things must happen:

Witnesses are peers with currently recognized witnessing competence. They collect and sign timestamps on the envelope. Once enough witness power accumulates, the allocation becomes valid — and anyone can independently confirm it.

Every trust allocation carries its own publication timestamp and matures individually. After a fixed maturation period (30 days by default, configurable via Legislation), the allocation starts counting toward attestation power.

The delay is the anti-Sybil defense — anyone has the maturation window to flag a fraudulent allocation before it counts. Because each allocation ages on its own timer, authority appears gradually as individual signals mature, never in a single calendar-bound dump.

You can revise or revoke allocations at any time, subject to a community-set revision rate limit. Updates only take effect after they themselves mature, so power transitions are gradual — never a synchronized spike, never a stale calendar lag.

Trust isn't only positive. You can allocate negative trust on bad actors — a public signal that starves them of attestation power and makes their content filterable across the network.

Negative trust expires over time. Change your behavior, and your reputation recovers. It's more forgiving than permanent bans — and more honest than shadow-banning.

The equal split of 100 trust allocations per participant is not a mechanism to prevent centralization, nor to force it. It is a balance between the two — a lever that the community holds in its own hands.

Some tasks genuinely benefit from concentrated competence. Identity-verification, forensic analysis, security auditing — if the community feels stronger checks are required and should be done by only a few highly competent peers, they allocate trust to reflect that. Centralization becomes a deliberate choice, not an accident of who showed up first.

And when a process has drifted too far — when the same few names accumulate power for too long — participants can allocate negative trust on the top trusted peers. That starves the concentrated authority of attestation power and forces the process to decentralize again.

The same tool that enables centralization provides the lever to reverse it. No committee picks the balance point — the network does, continuously, at every snapshot.