Author: Daniel Rice 2014-06-16 20:53:09
Published on: 2014-06-16T20:53:09+00:00
In a discussion about trust in instant providers, Mike Hearn explains that trust can be more automated in this case than it can with certificate authorities (CAs). The difference is that when a CA does something it shouldn't, nobody knows about it unless they mess up. However, double spends on the network can be monitored and stored for history. Merchants can share information on instant provider trust with each other and build up a credit history of a given instant provider without really knowing who they are. Daniel Rice raises concerns about how to bootstrap the trust, but Hearn argues that it's no different from the CA problem. People can only mentally handle a few trust anchors, so the trust starts out narrowly funneled and grows outwards as things get outsourced. For instant providers, it would go from one merchant to four to five payment processing engines to dozens of hardware manufacturers to hundreds of thousands of devices.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T00:02:13.982663+00:00