You are also blurring the concept or paradigm of WoT with the reference to PGP keys as a Certificate Auth vs a Trust Authority.
I guess I was confused by your use of "trust" and "trust authority". When you mention WoT I immediately think of PKI, PGP and cryptography, because that's where the term originates.
A Cert Auth simply verifies the auth of the ID and has nothing to do with any history of ratings associated with that ID.
Right. Which is exactly what a web of trust was traditional used for also. A WoT was originally a decentralized alternative to having a centralized certificate authority. Now, making assertions about the trustworthiness of an entity can be thought of as sort of an extension of that idea and you could use either type of PKI system for that. Really, the term "web of trust" is somewhat nebulous because people use it loosely to describe several different things.
Also the Cert Auth is "centralized" but my DB should not be?
I'm not making any judgment one way or the other. I was just wondering why you thought your system was better than existing PKI systems for establishing authenticity (or trustworthiness).
The existing WoT system(s) [I know of only 1] have proven at least to be somewhat effective but they (it) is and has been open to hacking which was illustrated in the link in my first post.
The Bitcoin OTC WoT is really cool but if you examine it you will see that it is hackable and ratings can accumulate which basically throws off the usability of the rating.
That whole thread (the one you linked to) seems cryptic. I guess someone with the handle FooDSt4mP stole some BTC from someone? And you're saying someone (FooDSt4mP?) actually hacked in to the gribble bot database and changed his own rating?
Rating accumulating sounds like a good thing. For what it's worth, it looks like FooDSt4mP has a pretty terrible rating on #bitcoin-otc.
If for example celebrities were in WoT with the current rating system (not bitcoin realated WoT, I'm talking a sort of universal WoT) then you would see ratings of a million.
Obviously a rating of a million one would expect to be ridiculously trustworthy which clearly wouldn't be accurate.
This wouldn't happen in my system.
Okay, wait, you lost me here -- why would a celebrity get a rating of a million?
Mad-sciency?
Not sure if that was a compliment or not.
No offense intended. It's just you're claiming to have a solution for trust issues involving Bitcoin, but you're not really sharing it so others can vet it.