Thank you too - your response was very clear.

If I understand correctly, your fundamental point is that if somebody/thing is going to assert equivalence between a "blockchain asset" and a real-world asset then a legal entity, ultimately needs to stand behind this assertion as there needs to be *something* that will act as the bridge to the real world. And if you have an identifiable entity as part of the system then some of the constraints that drove the original designs of bitcoin et al can be questioned, right?

Your chain (no pun intended) of reasoning then becomes: "if we're going to have one trusted entity in the system, why not generalise the concept to one where *any* entity can be assigned some notion of trust and see where that takes us" I think.   Which I think is a great insight.

I'm still unconvinced that it *would* generalise in the real-world, however.   

For example, I'm not yet seeing the circumstances under which I would assign non-zero trust values to any entity other than the issuer of an asset unless I had some other out-of-band information about them from which I could make a determination about their trustworthiness (e.g. if they were a well-known and trusted brand, say?).

If all I have to observe is their behaviour inside the system, then I don't understand the economic analysis / game-theoretic story that means they wouldn't easily be able to "build up" trust for some period of time before mounting a catastrophic attack.   Perhaps the situation would be no worse than one in a "colored coin on bitcoin" world, where the attacks I discussed at the start of the thread could potentially occur - but I don't know.

Disclosure: I've not yet had chance to read the other papers... so if you discuss these issues there (or elsewhere), please just tell me to RFTM.

Richard