The Hitchhiker Trust Model is a human-centered, reputation-based trust network designed to balance algorithmic integrity with deep personal judgment.
Each trustee is verified through proof-of-personhood and self-sovereign identity, ensuring they are real individuals. Judgments are recorded on an immutable blockchain-like ledger, combining transparency with privacy through zero-knowledge proofs.
It starts with a core group of 42 trustees, organized into six groups of seven, who are entrusted with evaluating human qualities such as peacefulness.
The model uses cross-checking between groups to detect outliers and prevent corruption, while external real-world feedback ensures that trustees’ reputations are adjusted based on actual outcomes. If a trustee endorses someone who later acts contrary to the valued quality, the endorsing trustee’s reputation is correspondingly downgraded.
This structure is both self-healing and evolutionary, with a built-in feedback loop that tunes the network’s reliability over time. By insisting on small-group, in-depth dialogue and qualitative deliberation, the model maintains a balance between algorithmic governance and personal trust.