But the point is, we have seen:
A) The "trusted people" abuse that power numerous times. So they aren't really trusted, are they?
B) The default trust list is not based off of people who are trustworthy, they are based off of Theymos friends and acquaintances.
Neither of those two scenarios is worthy of putting any trust in. A user should not have any trusted people listed in his list by default. He (or she) should have people in there based on their dealings with them. If they do a trade or something, when they leave feedback, have it ask if they want to be put into the trust list. They could also put someone in there manually... but having DeafultTrust in the trust list is a bad idea, no matter how you slice it. It just sets up everyone for failure, as we have ample evidence for at this point.
Fair point. However, I just want to make it clear that I don't know Theymos IRL. In fact, I'm not even sure how I got into the DefaultTrust group. I made this account to talk smack to Smoothie back in the Solidcoin drama days (not that I was a big Solidcoin supporter; I just liked playing devil's advocate). I could be as foul-mouthed and as much of a dick as I wanted to without tarnishing the rep of my actual account. Then at some point this account actually had better rep than my main and my ratings on others actually had a huge impact, and that's when I realized I had better get my shit together and start being more impartial and be more considerate of other peoples situations. Not every brand-new account asking for a loan is a scammer. Not every person selling MSDN invites is out to take your money and run. So if you get a negative rating from me and you don't agree with it, just shoot me a PM and I'll give it a second look, it's not that big a deal. I don't get a huge power trip out of flagging people... unless it's an
actual scammer.
Anyway, I'm not even sure where I was going with this.
I'm sure you do a fine job and take your position responsibly. But not everyone does, and in fact a lot of people in the DefaultTrust don't or worse yet, they are active scammers. This is no different than luke-jr cutting out Satoshidice transactions from the gentoo distro, except in reverse. He is deciding what users should and should not accept as transactions, whereas Theymos i deciding who and who not to trust. In either event, the user can choose to change that, but the default should be nothing at all.
What is ironic is that for a system (bitcoin) that is built around decentralization and trustless systems, making a trusted, centralized "list" that all users are force-ably "opted-in" to, instead of having to manually select it themselves is, how you say, "absurd," "hypocritical?"