Decoding trust

In this episode of Trust Revolution, Shawn welcomes Dr. David Strayhorn, a neurologist, electrical engineer, and freedom technologist, for a deep dive into Web of Trust. Recorded at Bitcoin Park in Nashville, David shares his journey from clinical practice to building Brainstorm, a personal Web of Trust relay on Nostr, and GrapeRank, an algorithm reimagining trust curation. Together, they explore how decentralized systems can empower individuals to control their data and trust networks, challenging centralized gatekeepers and reshaping how we find truth in a skeptical world.

Trust doesn't live in any one place in the brain, just like there's no single neuron in charge. It's decentralized, like the systems we're building.

— David Strayhorn

Timestamps

  • 00:03 Trust from a neurologist's perspective
  • 02:26 Decentralized brain: no single trust center
  • 07:53 Web of Trust primer: data store + grapevine
  • 11:36 Contextual trust: not one size fits all
  • 16:51 Current state: Yelp, Amazon, broken reviews
  • 19:58 Building blocks: inventing vs. standing on giants
  • 24:13 Simplicity principle: lessons from Bitcoin and Nostr
  • 27:11 Nostr as the hotspot for Web of Trust
  • 32:43 PageRank to GrapeRank: the evolution
  • 38:44 Nostropedia: decentralized Wikipedia vision
  • 44:24 Echo chambers vs. escaping echo chambers
  • 47:01 Why Meta won't build this
  • 50:04 Incentives for adoption
  • 56:49 Roadmap: alpha in weeks, SDK in months
  • 1:05:33 Five year vision for Web of Trust

Resources

About David Strayhorn

Dr. David Strayhorn is a board-certified neurologist specializing in epilepsy, with a background in electrical engineering. A decade-long contributor to freedom technology, he focuses on decentralized systems and Web of Trust protocols. His current project, Brainstorm, is a personal Web of Trust relay on Nostr, while GrapeRank is an extensible algorithm for contextual trust scores.

Nostr (opens in new tab) GitHub (opens in new tab)