Wow, a trust linking system that doesn't require any personal data, that is freakin' awesome. Kudos to you for thinking of that 
It does sound a little daunting at implementation. You mention p2p distribution, which makes it somewhat complex. A centralized, community controlled site would work too, no?
It does sound a little daunting at implementation. You mention p2p distribution, which makes it somewhat complex. A centralized, community controlled site would work too, no?
I like this idea a lot. I've been trying to think along these lines too and keep getting stuck with actual implementation. Is there a framework out there for a true centralized, yet community controlled site? Theoretically if we were to build the Trustbook, it could eat its own dog food and the most trusted members could be elected to have access to sensitive things like DB's, servers and such. I think this would help considerably as we set up more and more bitcoin websites/exchanges/businesses, as it would give a way to both verify the trustworthiness of the owner/operator but also the authenticity of that person as well.
The most important feature in 'community controlled' is, imo, trust. And trust is gained through disclosure. Think about my lottery site, I am actively preventing suspicion by providing everyone with as much information as possible, including the distribution of bets, so when I say there were 5x2nd prizes, that information can be checked against data that existed before the winning result was chosen.
On the same train of thought we could do accounts based on alias + public key, and allow people to choose their trusted parties (or untrusted, +1/0/-1). If we then disclose the alias trust linkage, I'm sure that all the smart people around here could detect suspicious movements. How could this system be broken? If I create 100 users that all trust my real user, then that user has +100, but none of the 100 fake users is trusted by anyone, so no profit there. But if my real user get trust points from the community, and I trust the 100 that trust me back, this would be slightly different, unless I don't care about who else trusts you, unless they are already in my web of trust.
But I digress, and I need to work