Human to human
Why?
With deepfakes, bots, AI, and all sorts of other agents and technologies coming our way fast and comprehensively, it has never been more important to know who and what we can trust.
Trust is human. Without trust we cannot exist. Trust enables us to make decisions. Without trust we cannot live our lives.
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As humans, we are quite good at trusting: we asses reliabilities, we assess competences, we asses honesty. We asses qualities of human beings. The Web of Trust enables us to trust without doubt in digital environments.
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But as we are about to enter a future where anything can be faked, our abilities are seriously challenged. With the Web of Trust we know exactly who or what we can trust.
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How?
Our Web of Trust directly connects one human being to another. There are no intermediaries involved, no companies, no governments, no individuals who want to profit from or manipulate our relationships.
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Such a true peer-to-peer environment can only be created on a public blockchain. A blockchain is a distributed database that is maintained by a community of members, and no-one (no individual, no group, no company, no government) can change or manipulate the information that has been written onto that blockchain.
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We use the Ethereum blockchain not only because it offers the best utility for our purpose, but also because it has by far the biggest community of dedicated developers who maintain and improve the ecosystem. We are talking about some 6000 real people from all parts of the world, which is roughly 3 times as many as in any other blockchain ecosystem.
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In particular, the Ethereum community has built the Ethereum Attestation Service (attest.org), an open-source infrastructure for making attestations onchain or offchain. Anything that is written onto this blockchain will remain there forever (that is quite a claim), and can never be changed or manipulated by anybody.
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Who?
Having observed current developments as an academic for some time now, Axel decided that something has to be done.
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The problems discussed before are just too serious, the technology is available, so: just do it!
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