Vouching and standing

There is no sign-up form and no identity check. You become a real member of a community the way you would in a village: someone who is already known says they know you.

Vouching

A vouch is a signed statement from one member that another member’s key belongs to a real, known person. It is recorded in the community’s history like everything else.

Vouching is not free. When you vouch for someone you put a little of your own standing behind them. If they turn out to be a fraud, or a second key for a person who already has one, it costs you. So vouch for people you actually know, and expect the same of others.

To vouch: find the person in the community list, check the address on their phone matches the one you see, and tap Vouch. Vouching needs the station reachable; it is one of the few things you cannot queue up offline.

Standing

Standing is the score the software computes for every member from the history: vouches received, trades completed, disputes lost, and how recently. Two things about it are unusual:

• It is never stored, only computed. Any station can replay the history and arrive at the same number. There is no field an administrator can edit.
• The formula is the same everywhere. No community can tune it. This is a deliberate choice so that standing means the same thing across communities when they eventually connect.

Your Standing screen shows your composite score and what feeds it. Standing decays slowly if you stop taking part, so it reflects who you are now, not who you were.

Established members

Once your standing crosses a threshold (a composite score of 2.0) and your identity is anchored by vouches, you are an established member. Established members are the community’s electorate: they vote on proposals, sit in the jury pool for disputes, and can be recovery holders for the station.

A community with fewer than three established members is in bootstrap grace: the founders stand in as the electorate so the community can govern itself from day one. The app shows a banner while grace is on. It ends by itself.

Limits on new members

To make it expensive to flood a community with fake people, the software rate limits how quickly a member can vouch and how fast a new identity can gain standing. If a vouch is refused with a velocity message, wait and try later; it is not personal.