Let me start by reiterating that a design goal of Circles is, that Circles of people that trust each other are worth the same. Ideally we can form a global trust network and Circles becomes globally accepted money that will benefit humans first instead of organizations/ cooperation or states.
The concept if trust = willing to exchange Circles 1:1 (instead of exchanging at a negotiable rate) adds a strong force into Circles that will make the value of individual Circles converge to a single value. (as long as enough trust connections exist)
With that statement out of the way - we can still look into ways to attach “scores” to individual Circles. The general intuition is: A circles token that is trusted by many and can be spend in many places, is more valuable than a Circles that no one wants to accept.
Measuring the number of accounts that trust another account is easy, but also easy to fake. I can create 1000 fake account, and have them all trust me. This however should not increase my score.
What we will need is some form of trust anchor - we need to feed out scoring system with some initial Circles account that certainly “have value”. A very easy (and objective way) to do that is picking Circles account that have added liquidity against their own Circles.
The next step is to give weight to accounts that have a “net positive” balance of relevant Circles. For each Circles user we can calculate how much Circles they generated over their lifetime - if you hold more Circles than you generated - you are a “net positive” Circles user. Note that all “organizational accounts” with a balance >0 are “net positive” as organizations do not generate Circles. Also
Now, we can apply a “page rank” approach and identify users that are trusted by users with a positive score. Adding those users to the set of “relevant Circles” will add more users as “net positive”.
In summary:
- Select set of initial Circes user
- Find accounts that hold a positive balance of relevant Circles
- mark accounts as relevant that are trusted by net-positive account (including orgs)
- go to 2.
Accounts marked by 3 could get a score <1. This could be used to discount those Circles in step 3. So you need to hold more of those to reach “net positive”.