notes: research/papers/kerione-open-reputation-framework

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research/papers/kerione-open-reputation-framework Open Reputation Framework summary v0.1 — 2026-10-15: drafted by Claude from the PDF in the Papers repository; unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only partner 507 # Open Reputation Framework **Abstract.** The low-level white paper for Open Reputation (Draft Revision 1.2, 2015/05/13) by Samuel M. Smith of The World Table: a notional architecture and partial formal specification for generating, evaluating and disseminating reputation in a trustworthy way. It defines reputes (reputational events), identities, cryptonyms and aliases, compares distributed consensus algorithms, and covers secure transmission, storage, privacy and repute composition. It predates KERI and includes an early discussion of self-certifying identifiers. ## Summary The abstract states that existing reputation approaches are narrow, and that Open Reputation aims to provide a general foundation for collecting, storing, authenticating, aggregating, evaluating and disseminating reputational events. Reputation is an indicator built up from reputes; trustworthiness comes from performing each processing step through a transparent, publicly verifiable method such as distributed consensus, which Open Reputation extends from a ledger to a public database. Section 1 defines reputation as past behavior used to predict future behavior in context, and sets out the terminology: reputee, identity, identifiers (primary, secondary, tertiary), descriptors, cryptonyms ("nyms"), aliases, repute, reputer and reputery. It describes an identity-cryptonym registry governed by a consensus ledger, identity disclosure and validation, an identity graph, JSON serialization, date-time stamps, and signing and encryption. Section 2, "Trustworthy Reputations", describes diffused trust through consensus pools, compares proof-of-work, proof-of-stake and Byzantine agreement, and introduces "Chainmail", which uses the image of a knitting that can unravel to describe majority-collusion attacks on a ledger and ways to bind it. It also covers an identity ledger and self-certifying identifiers, in which a public key embedded in the identifier lets a requester verify a signed response. Later sections propose Cred coupons to pay host nodes, protocols for secure transmission of reputes (including RAET), archival storage in the fog or cloud, reputation algorithms, three degrees of privacy (full public, semi-private, full private) plus group privacy, an architecture centered on an immutable database managed by consensus pools with Merkle roots anchored to blockchains, and notional repute compositions in JSON. ## Key terms repute, reputee, reputer, reputery, cryptonym, alias, identity-cryptonym registry, diffused trust, distributed consensus, Chainmail, self-certifying identifier, Cred, degrees of privacy ## Claims and their evidence - Existing reputation approaches do not provide a generalizable foundation across application domains. [informative] - A shared public ledger is trustworthy if a majority of the consensus pool is not colluding. [informative] - Calling consensus-based systems "trustless" is technically incorrect, since trust is diffused across the pool rather than removed. [informative] - A self-certifying identifier lets a requester verify a provider's signed response using the public key in the identifier. [informative] ## Related Open Reputation: The Decentralized Reputation Platform (companion high-level paper by Lincoln Cannon), Many Cubed (2017), Decentralized Self-certifying Self-Identifing Data (2017). ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-15 from the PDF `whitepapers/open-reputation-low-level-whitepaper.pdf` (40 pages), text extracted: abstract, sections 1.1, 1.3, 2.1, 2.4, 2.6, 3, 7.2 and 8 read in full, the rest by headings. Authorship: the PDF names Samuel M. Smith PhD (The World Table) as its sole author; Lincoln Cannon is not named in this paper. Not yet read by Mark.

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