Universal Trustworthiness (2/2)

[This post was first made on Cent here]

First of all thanks to @kwame, @Ezincrypto, @GreenGiant, @agfnzn10 and @Reol for your thought provoking replies to my previous post. You all basically helped write this post🙏

In this follow-up post I want to look at 'thoughtfulness' or the ability to act civilly and provide value, which I see as potentially becoming *the* fundamental indicator used to establish a universal standard of basic trustworthiness.

But first I want to talk about Cent. Cent has, on the whole, one of the most thoughtful groups of users around. Hacker News, as well as the commentariat at avc.com, wolfstreet.com and maybe Quilette are the only other places on the internet that I know of with majority thoughtful users.

There are way more thoughtful people out in the internets and in the real world too. They pop up from time to time on Twitter or Reddit as well as in the real world in the workplace or on the street. And then they disappear, with only the memory of their thoughtfulness left in your mind.

What is setting Cent apart from those sites and real life instances, though, is that we are aggregating those thoughtful users by way of selective rewards. Although it isn't perfect yet, thoughtful replies (when delivered in a timely manner) are nearly always rewarded while trolly spam replies from users like @Kamran are not. Importantly these thoughtful replies are rewarded based on a wise crowd of users who are constantly sorting (i.e. evaluating) replies.

I see the series of thoughtful replies that Centians are getting rewarded for as forming a pattern of universal trustworthiness. It's universal for a few reasons. First of all because the transactions linked to the rewards for thoughtful replies can be recorded in public on the Ethereum blockchain, thus potentially creating a simple, publically verifiable data set of individual trustworthiness. Secondly, this constantly updating data set could be used by other sites as a way to screen new users who haven't used their site and/or don't have a reputation yet. Thirdly, individuals would be able to carry their thoughtful reputations with them anywhere - reputation, at least in this basic but incredibly significant form, would no longer only exist in other peoples heads.

Every reward that goes to a reply becomes an objective data point signaling that the person behind the reply is a thoughtful person, or at the very least is capable of being thoughtful which is no less important. The same goes for everyone else. Overtime as the frequency of rewards as well as total earnings from thoughtful replies increases for individual users, that transaction history which can be saved to a public blockchain becomes an even more reliable signal of thoughtfulness and thus trustworthiness.

What more could anyone ask for when they are trying to make the decision to trust someone at first than an easy, reliable way to discern whether or not they're dealing with a thoughtful person or not?

Until now it's been impossible to tell, at least initially, whether or not someone is basically trustworthy. There has been no easily verifiable indicator for that. You can't quickly tell that by looking at a persons CV. Maybe their history of social media use or carrying out a reference check or two could color in some of who they are, but that is usually impractical and takes to much effort. I see Cent as potentially leading the way on creating a new paradigm for reputation (despite this never being a direct aim) because it is helping to create the basis for a universal trustworthiness in aggregating and constantly evaluating thoughtfulness.