Trust Enhancement

Trust Model and Security Properties

The Witness Protocol provides trust reduction, not trustlessness. A witness signature guarantees authenticity and integrity of the statement, but not objective correctness. Incorrect information can be signed; accountability is therefore tied to the witness identity.

Trust can be further reduced by combining attestations from multiple witnesses and by applying quorum or threshold requirements. This limits the impact of faulty or malicious witnesses but does not eliminate trust assumptions entirely.

The protocol makes trust explicit and auditable. Clients can always distinguish witness-based verification from proof-based verification and reason about the associated risk.

Crypto-economic Extensions

The Witness Protocol can be extended with crypto-economic mechanisms to further reduce trust assumptions. In such models, witnesses are required to post collateral in the form of a stake.

If a witness is proven to have signed incorrect or conflicting statements, its stake can be partially or fully slashed. This introduces a strong economic disincentive against dishonest behavior.

To make such systems viable, witnesses must also be compensated for correct behavior. Rewards may be paid per attestation or through aggregated mechanisms. Fees can be provided by clients or subsidized by applications relying on witness-based verification.

Crypto-economic witnesses transform trust from a purely organizational assumption into an economically enforced guarantee. While this does not achieve trustlessness, it significantly increases the cost of misbehavior.