TL;DR: Use curation voting as a proxy for trust. This eliminates explicit trust-voting, and leverages the solid engagement we already have with curation voting.
Something like this proposal sounds like the right way to go. Here's my thought: requiring people to pick 30 people they know and vote for them sounds like a recipe for people to get "stuck" in positions that they shouldn't be in. We've seen this over and over again in Bitshares where a witness needs to be voted out, but the only way to do it is for whales to coordinate. Why don't you make the voting implicit? We already have active voting on the network in the form of people voting for articles. It should be possible to leverage that voting activity to build an account-rank.
Here's a flippant, poorly-thought-out implementation:
- Everybody has a "seed" account rank determined by something like their SP.
- We track the last week's worth of votes cast by each account, and make a list of the top 60 accounts voted for by each account
- Then, you multiply the # of votes cast for each account by each account's account-rank, and the result is that account's new account-rank.
It doesn't sound computationally intensive; there aren't any matrix inverses or anything like you have in page-rank. You'd have to check if the algorithm converges and all that.