I agree, the bootstrapping trust is a hard issue, and I don't think either that a distributed system will magically fix things. What would happen is we'd just change one set of problems for another one, but IMHO it'd be a better system overall. In this case, making things more visible is a better thing. That's an interesting point about the way a distributed model would evolve. My question is: does it matter? If we could more easily spot a bad actor, wouldn't it make everyone behave better?