Fractal Trust Network
You can only ruler you can trust is a dead one
This systems attempts to solve issues of verification and trust management in a Decentralized P2P network and to utilize the trust system to increase network robustness. It is inspired by current Darknet techniques of requiring all new nodes to be vouched for by existing nodes. The name is a description of the resulting topology, where essentially more self similar detail is exposed as you lower the level of trust.
The Existing Idea
	The motivating factors for a “Network of Trust” is to determine if a given node should trust another node not to defect in a transaction. The core problem of a network of trust is scalability, in order to discern the trust level between any two nodes a route between them on the “graph of trust” and then based on the weight of each link calculate the trust value and make decisions accordingly. This requires each node to track a “quality of experience” weight with each peer it interacts with.
A Possible Better Idea
	This technique would be compatible with any existing DHT or P2P network topology with minimal modification. Versus a “flat” topology like the one described above, we can break the “trust” graph into tiers. Each node has a global “trust rating” (here referred to as a real number from 1.0 to 0.0 where higher indicates more trusted.) The system is “seeded” with one 1.0 trust level Public key. These Public keys will be the only knowledge required for future nodes to verify the trust of other nodes and it is important that the associated private keys.
	Every node has a public key and other identifiers (MAC, IP) and can authenticate new nodes into the system by signing a message containing the identifiers of the new node and it’s bestowed trust level(equal to or lower than the parent). When two nodes begin to peer they can exchange “pedigrees” which contain the chain of authorizations all the way from the initial seed key.
The Pedigree allows an initial degree of trust to be established. A node may then, at its leisure poll the parent peer node’s “ancestors” to check if any of them have since “disowned” a member of the tree. The idea of a Pedigree authentication allows nodes quickly and scalability authenticate other nodes. Because each Pedigree contains a public key, MAC and IP it makes man in the middle attacks very difficult and allows for SSL tunneling between all peers without a CA. The ability for a node to “disown” a node allows higher level nodes to nullify any coerced or malicious nodes facilitating sybil attack.
	The primary benefit of this technique is to allow for greater robustness. In addition to keeping a normal peer list. Each node should maintain a peer list only considering nodes of equal or higher trust rating. This results in a topology that has self similar “tiers” which protect against attacks at lower trust ratings. Messages can be assigned a “minimum trust level” which indicates they should not be routed along links of lower than the specified trust. This ensures that transactions between higher level nodes are difficult to interfere with and topology of higher tiers of nodes cannot be disrupted by failures or attacks at the lower tiers.