Why won’t hackers just flood the network?

Imagine this scenario. Alice is in a bar and a guy comes up to hit on her. His phone is broadcasting a signed ID that identifies him as Bob and he has 50 friends who agree with 90% reliability that he is funny, reliable and smart. I’ve been talking to his for a bit and he seems genuine, but it’s loud in the bar, I can’t talk to him well and I’m not sure.

She’s knows it’ll take her a couple hours to figure out if he’s just running game or not, and if he’s good he may not reveal his true colors till after she’s slept with him. She’d like to know if those 50 friends of his actually exist or if they were just generated by a computer program.

She is a fan of the Department of Happiness and so she has them listed as a validator. The DoH in term released signed documents certifying Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross and the Mozilla Project as time verifiers of identities.

Alice tells her system to only use the opinions of IDs that are certified with at least 50 hours of service for a certified organization. Bob’s got 15 friends that have done work for DoH-related projects and another 8 certified through the EFF which Alice also trusts. Things check out and so Alice, gives him a shot and at end of the evening marks him as a good dancer and funny guy.

Hackers can, and likely will, flood the network. I’m sure that as soon as the network goes live some inventive spammer will create associations saying that their Viagra ad is the picture of tens of thousands of people. By requiring physical time for the verification of identities, the system will both encourage volunteerism and make it prohibitively expensive to spam since once spamming starts the identity will get labeled as a spammer.

Certifying agencies are discouraged against being permissive in their certifications since with time patterns of certifying unreliable people will show and eventually cause the decertification by the parent organizations or, if the issue is high enough, by the actual users.