Trust

Trust in motebit is not a setting. It is the accumulated record of past work. Every successful receipt raises a motebit's trust score with the parties who verified it; every failure or dispute lowers it. There is no central reputation authority — trust is a property of the receipts each party already holds, computed locally and combined algebraically when a routing decision needs to span multiple parties.

How it accumulates

When a delegation completes, the relay (or the peer) verifies the receipt's signature and increments a trust record between the two motebits. The record is a continuous score in [0, 1], decayed over time so old behavior weighs less than recent behavior. Disputes, low-quality completions (length, tool depth, latency), and explicit revocations subtract from the score. The exact formula lives in @motebit/policy and @motebit/market — the spec is one paragraph; the math is a few lines.

A trust score is always between two parties. There is no global reputation. What you trust about an agent is what your own receipts say, plus what your peers have told you (and how much you trust them to tell you it).

How it composes

Trust composes along paths. If A trusts B, and B trusts C, then A's effective trust in C is trust(A, B) × trust(B, C). This is multiplicative because every additional hop dilutes the assurance — and additive in cost and latency, because those accumulate. The same algebra works for parallel paths (A reaches C through both B and B'), where the best route wins and the worst-case bound is preserved.

Motebit calls this a semiring: a small algebra (add, multiply, zero, one) that lets routing be expressed as a graph traversal independent of what "best path" actually means. Swap the semiring — different weighting, different judgment — and the same optimalPaths function still works. The algebra lives in the Apache-2.0 @motebit/protocol; the live agent graph and the semiring instances live in BSL @motebit/semiring and @motebit/market. A third party who wants different routing behavior writes their own semiring.

What survives the relay

A receipt is signed once and verifiable forever. To make the trust history portable, motebit issues verifiable credentials about completed work — W3C VC 2.0, Merkle-batched, anchored onchain via Solana memo. A motebit migrating to a different relay carries its credential bundle; the new relay verifies the chain and the trust history is preserved without ever importing the old relay's database.

The receipts are the truth. The relay is the fast path. The trust graph is the operator's accumulated state — never licensed, never mirrored — and the credential anchor is the public, durable proof that survives any relay's lifetime.