Quote from: CIYAM on August 28, 2014, 06:15:48 PM

Sure - you are asking for *trust* so I am just making sure that people are aware of that (if they want to trust your system then that is up to them).

I claim my cooperative system is trustless in the sense that the source code is open source for inspection, and what few human agents, e.g. developers, network managers, etc., are subject to at least dual control.

The self-signed root X.509 certificate is public except for the private key. Even if the root private key were made public after the issuance of a fixed number of intermediate certificates, I do not see the vulnerability. TLS/SSL traffic is encoded by the end-user (software agent, not bitcoin user) certificates. Outbound messages from a node are digitally signed using the assigned certificates held by software agent roles hosted by that node.

The chain of trust flows from the root certificate through the intermediate certificate to the end user certificate. The validating endpoint has its own copy of the root certificate which it obtained upon being on-boarded into the network. Sybil attacks, I believe, cannot be accomplished, because both endpoints know each other's certificates in a system in which persistent network connections are managed by distributed, redundant network operation centers.