Ideas

I think this is a needed idea, however, it seems labor intensive. I wonder if it could generate enough revenue to sustain itself.

If there will be levels of authenticating people, then it might. I mean you don't expect the people actually going to verify the users getting paid too much, but they will still get paid. Information about the users (such as authenticated pics) will be saved on the server so that people will have to go through the site to view authenticated information (generating hits, might be good for commercials) and it's a valuable service that will be good to sell for a site or a person in order to verify site users or himself, and thus creating quite a nice cash-flow.

imho: this would crash and burn.

the people who wan't to be anonymous will stay clear of the sites requiring authentication, leaving those who don't care about being secretive.

practically speaking, using cambrianhouse.com as a community that relies on trust (phantom voting and whatnot): is ch going to send out someone to identify me along with other people registered in gothenburg/sweden (assuming i might create other local users to explain the same ip-range showing up in the logs) to make sure that i'm not cloning myself over different accounts and that i am who i say i am?

you'd need an extremely upscale and exclusive service to make it profitable to have agents around the globe, or limit your users to certain areas (in which case i'll just register as living within your area but be conveniently out of town everytime you come around to check up on me. i'd use TOR or other proxy to thwart traceroute).

being able to verify your identity is a good thing when doing business, but to the extent this is necessary it's done with credit card verification and such. people who misuse those systems become a matter for law enforcement.

about the only way i see a use of this is for a local dating agency that supplements their irl offices with online services (come in and identify yourself before you're entered into our db), but that's already happening, no?

being anonymous on the net is a feature, not a bug.

cheers : m

People verifying each other is basically now certification systems work. A person with a certificate offers it to somebody else who endorses it. That person is then has a certificate validated by the person who endorsed them, but (additionally) the people who validated the person doing the validating lend the weight of their own credibility. A person with ten people validating them who each are validated by ten other people has a 10:90 rating in certification terms. That means validated by 10 people known to 90 other people. Simple? I think that your system would be a lot like this but less cumbersome that actual digital certificates.