Mankind has developed certain ways for people to trust and distrust each other, despite commonly experiencing betrayal and occasionally even treason. This is what Trinity Technology brings into the digital realm.

It is relying on oneself, not blindly following someone else, that made humans into such a resilient species. Your trust is something that only you can give to others. Trust is delegation, and you can only delegate what is yours.

Human trust is specific: We rarely completely trust another person, and if we do, it more often than not turns out to be a bad idea. Our trust therefore not only has a subject, e.g. a person, group or institution, it also has an object or objective, which we at P3KI call a topic. As an example, we trust you to retrieve this file from our Web server, but we don't trust you to edit it, leave alone giving you a root account on the machine.

Human trust works by being transitive: If A trusts B with topic T, and B trusts C with the same topic T, A tends to trust C with topic T, although often reluctantly so. For all practical purposes, transitive trust is a human's only option, simply because the alternative of personally verifying over 8×109 people wouldn't work.

There are concepts revolving around so-called “strong identity”, which promise exactly that, but only if one submits to those who issued that “strong identity”. Being a German company, all of history, taste, as well as Godwin's law (in that order), prohibit us from naming the most well-known examples of what the outcome of such ideas could look like. Let's just say that something like “full identity” is not a good idea and never was.

In cryptographic systems, revocation refers to handling cases from “Oh crap, my diary!” to “Oh crap, my country!” and the ability to deal with that situation, which usually centers around something called a key compromise. However, in the vast majority of cases, all we want to do is retract trust we have given or which was fraudulently given in our name. Whether retracting this trust is noticed or not shall be all the same to us. In P3KI's Trinity Technology, the flawed concept of revocation does not exist. Any trust relation that is no longer valid simply disappears.

While the phrase “trusting someone for distrust” seems odd at first, it is just another way of describing “warning” as something you have be trusted for.

When a professor10 at Regent Law School and former defense attorney teaches together with an Officer of the Virginia Beach Police Department why one should never talk to the police, they make a pretty good case about it. Nevertheless will we drop flat onto the sidewalk when a person in a police uniform urges us to do so because of a shooting in the house next door. We might not trust the police, but we trust them for information about distrusting third parties, which in this example is not trusting people with sub-machine-guns in that building next door for letting you live.

Negation of trust is quite different from Distrust, as it requires a prior trust relation. If there was no trust, negating it would have no effect. Negation is commonly the result of betrayal, no matter how the trusting side came to the conclusion that it has been betrayed. An interesting property of Negation is that it somewhat resists propagation, i.e. Negation is, for most practical purposes, not transitive. People seem to sense that it's something personal and are reluctant to incorporate it into their own trust network. The exception of family or clan feuds only underlines that by the fact that feuds are enforcing a common trust model on everyone within the group in order to ensure a united front against the other side, however that is defined. Identity

Common wisdom dictates that trust is impossible without having a strong identity first: “If I don't know who you are, how can I trust you?”

Being a wonderful example of the fallacies of so-called “common wisdom”, this one simply holds trust upside down:

Identity is a subset of trust!

And identity is a name someone claimed to identify her- or himself. This step is referred to as identification. In order to become an identity in the sense it is used today, others want to verify that this claim is valid. For that they turn to some third party, asking to verify the claim. This step is referred to as authentication: making sure that the identification was correct. Entering a username and password is just that.