The sense of justice—the conviction that wrongs are made right and merit is rewarded—is the strongest cohesive force of society. When centralized institutions of governance cannot deliver this sense because the cost of enforcing a right exceeds the value of the right itself, social cohesion erodes. Current institutional structures fail to resolve a significant class of disputes in systematically the same way that central planning fails to allocate resources: through information asymmetry, missing feedback loops, and disconnection of decision-makers from the consequences of their decisions. This paper presents a Reputation Social Network (RSN): a decentralized, censorship-resistant communication layer built on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) that enables pseudonymous participants to publish, verify, and consume reputation information about real-world behavior. The core mechanism rests on three design principles: (1) an asymmetric cost structure where reading reputation data is inexpensive but writing requires verifiable effort; (2) a nondeterministic verifier selection protocol based on consistent hashing that prices radical claims through escalating iteration costs; and (3) a market-driven reputation authority model where private verifiers stake their accumulated reputation on the accuracy of claims they endorse. The resulting architecture produces emergent meritocracy without central coordination and enables a gradual, reversible migration path from existing state-administered systems.
Pavel Kudrna (Sun,) studied this question.