On Wed, 28 May 2003 13:33:22 PDT, Einar Stefferud said:
"A trusts B" and "B trusts C" does not imply anything about "A trusting C".
Even though you might decide to act on this assumption, believing it is true.
Mathematically provably true is a term used mostly by mathematicians - which
often means that what they come up with (being mathematicians(*) and thus often
disjoint from reality) is something that may be not usable. There are a LOT
of transitive trust relationships that may not be *strictly* true, but are
close enough to trust billions of dollars with...
Every time I use a credit card, the entire scheme only works because the
vendor trusts the people at Visa to trust the bank to trust me to actually
pay the bill. Now mathematically speaking, this scheme is a large crock
of concentrated fertilizer - but you add a few laws making it illegal to
use it to defraud, the various middlemen take 3-4%, write off 1% for bad
debt losses, and you have a system that 99% works and is widely accepted
because that last 1% is just too much effort for too little gain.
If this assumption is true, then you must be a very gullible person,
which I somehow seriously doubt;-)...
The next time you walk into a delicatessen and hand the cashier a piece
of paper printed by some government, and walk out of there holding a
salami and several smaller-denomination pieces of paper and pieces of
metal, think about what size web of trust makes *that* transaction work.
/Valdis
(*) My degree is in math. I'm allowed to say that. ;)
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