>
two aspects to consensus
Well, consensus isn't just one thing with two aspects. There are many things one might ask for consensus about, and many groups you might ask for it from. There's miner consensus about transaction ordering, miner consensus about soft fork signaling, developer consensus about the desirability and readiness of a particular change (to the code / miner consensus rules), there's consensus about these changes from various sub communities within and related to bitcoin, and the broader consensus of the whole bitcoin community. And probably many others. Most of these types of consensus involve trust to various degrees. I think that's what you mean by there being more than one aspect of consensus, yes?
> the live advogato system .. remained 100% spam-free of off-topic articles throughout its entire life.
Very impressive!
> if those pseudo-identities are not linked to anyone .. they .. remain isolated.
I see. Because anyone measuring consensus is only measuring it with respect to their own trust network, anyone not transitively trusted by the person measuring consensus is simply ignored.
> i made some modifications that required a *minimum number* of incoming Trust Declarations before Flow was permitted to cross outwards.
I wouldn't think this is sufficient, since an attacker could put in effort to achieve whatever minimum you come up with. For example, an attacker could pose as someone with a particular popular point of view, put in effort to produce actual helpful content that's interesting to their target audience, and therefore get plenty of trust from people, but then they could mark themselves as trusting of various sock puppets. The only way I can think of solving that problem is for people in the community to be able to investigate and somehow recognize something's weird about who that outwardly helpful person trusts and detrust them because of it. Are there other mechanisms to deal with this kind of thing, maybe as part of Keynote?
> hilariously, such isolated networks, being easy to identify, and also entirely public, allow the existence of attackers to come to public awareness.
I suppose this is related to my thought above.
> negative Certs were discussed but never implemented because they could do more harm than good.
How so?
> the other weakess is: *it takes discipline to maintain*. you cannot incentivise people to do this kind of thing without risking invitation of bribery.
What do you mean by "discipline"? Discipline amongst who? The whole network? The operator of something like Avogato? An individual who wants to measure consensus?
> a zero-value transaction gets the entry into the chain.
> who on earth wants to pay BTC to make some "stupid" declaration of whom they "trust"?
I don't see a reason to commit any of this data to the blockchain. Why not just have a network where nodes collect and/or query for the data they need? Such a thing would be far less expensive (could potentially even be free). Since declarations of trust are always signed, they're all verifiable. There's no double spending problem here because any "double spend" (ie two signed conflicting declarations) only serves to dilute or nullify that person's contribution to consensus (which is basically only bad for the "double spender"). If one wanted to connect a signed declaration to a block, they could simply include the block hash in the signature, which would verify that the declaration was signed after that block happened, and it could mean that the declaration is valid from that block until a new declaration is signed with a newer block's hash. If one wanted to but some financial barriers in place to limit sybil attacks, you could require a zero-value transaction that records the public key (or a hash of the public key) like you mentioned. However, rather than charging a fee to register a public key, you could instead simply require that the public key be associated with UTXOs. This works best when it makes sense to weight any declaration by the value contained in the associated UTXOs, like I suggest doing with
coin-weighted polling here.