I am familiar with the concepts of Circles and I understand that personal trust is the base of the social graph. However, that might slow down adoption, as it is very difficult for eg. online services to be paid in CRC.
Trust-Hubs
In lack of a better name wouldn’t a regular Circles account be useful which is “known” by others and implements it’s own trust realization, ie. by verifying Twitter or Github accounts, up to performing a KYC. This Circles account would act as a 3rd party “Trust-Hub”, providing a lot of trust connections which are not originated in personal knowledge of the people, but in a communicated means of identity verification of unknown people (like KYC, Social Networks, proven state identities, etc.).
Trust-Hub Clients
Depending on the “amount” of trust I want to ensure, I can decide to
- Not support Trust-Hubs at all (this would be the default for real local communities)
- Support only a certain level of trust (ie. facilitated by KYC with video identification)
- Support soft levels of trust (ie. facilitated by verified Twitter or Github accounts)
This could just be another option for realizing a “trust-level” and a compromise between real individual, personal trust and “centralized”, intermediated trust provided by 3rd parties.
What is the opinion of the Circles team on these options?
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We had similar ideas at the same time 
Isn’t this like exactly what Keybase does?
You verify your own account with the services you own, plus a combination of people who follow/trust you.
Come to think of it, Keybase should have called it “trusting” instead of following.
Someone also had a solution for Groups where users could control the amount of trust they put into an account, to control how much transitive tokens would go to that account
I’d like to try using BrightID or a sort of home-made version of it by having weekly video meetups for local groups who can see & verify real users, and make trust connections.
Whichever local economic group discovers the best methods for trust onboarding can share with the wider Circles community.
There’s no sense in waiting around for a single idea to emerge from the centralized core team.
BrightID looks like they had some similar ideas to Circles regarding “trust”, except they didn’t include the UBI. I’m intrigued what happens in those “verification parties”? Are people required to show their ids or passports to everyone there to prove they are who they say they are? Also wondering which “data id wallet privacy app” will prevail in the end of all these projects. Or people will need a trust wallet to collect all of these ids in.
No, the ID is not based on or referred from other sources, like nation-states.
It’s just simply “is this person the same one in their photo”, and a simple gradient for how well or not you know them. Apps that use this can require a certain level of recognition, similar to most services that already exist. (compare getting an email acct vs getting an acct at a crypto exchange for large fiat trades.)
Like Circles trust graph, the quality & numbers of connections will greatly affect the potential flow through that local network area.
Sorry, overlooked this thread before - but yeah - what you describe as “trust-hubs” us another variation of “group-currencies” and I indeed believe it will be crucial for Circles.
I added a draft for a blog post here - as we have the xDai chain problems currently, the examples cannot be tried out, however it worked before. Would love to get feedback, especially as the “Group Currency” idea in the other thread kind of contradicts this setup, but changing it to an “external” Group Currency Coin would be easy and might be better, as in this setup the Trusthub would run out of money quickly.
https://ice09.github.io/circles-trusthub-for-verified-twitter-accounts/