How much modification would be needed to Duniter to be able to manage the WoT in a more centralized way?
For example, if there is a database of people and you want to automatically add/remove to the WoT based on who’s in the database?
The dividends could still be made in a decentralized way, just the WoT would be centrally managed instead of requiring people to send certificates, etc.
Just to clarify a little bit, I’m not looking to completely replace the WoT with a centralized database. To the contrary, I would like to keep the WoT and everything else in Duniter but simply provide some additional way for a central database to guide the WoT growth. What are the options to enable such a thing?
So, all normal WoT features would work as they do now where people can certify each other to be added, but there would also be a way for a central database to add people who will receive the dividends but are “pending” in terms of finding their place in the WoT. It would be perfectly fine if these people have some kind of visible temporary status, etc.
This would solve a few issues for me:
Possible requirements for getting into the “central database” (this is just list of ideas, not definitive):
So the problem you are trying to solve here is the problem of growth.
If you think about it, growth is a tricky subject that is not white or black. You can’t just say “let’s grow that thing to infinity!” without thinking of logistics.
Slow growth can be problematic if you want massive adoption within a short time frame.
Fast growth can cause other problems, such as scalability, and adoption by unaware and ill-informed people can also be a problem as they will use your “product” (whatever it is) in ways that may not be intended and that could break the whole thing, causing the collapse of the system either socially or technically.
So yes, you may be anxious that the current growth is slow: you see 370 members, and for sure that is a low number, but by looking at the absolute number, we tend to forget that for the last few months, the Wot has grown at a steady rate of 20+% per month, which is a very solid growth, from my point of view. If it goes on like this, we could reach almost 10k members in a year. And when you think about it, if we were stressing the parameters of the Wot to the extreme, where every single member would emit 6 certifications per month (that’s the current maximum), the Wot would grow at a crazy rate of 220% per month, leading to a 2+ million members in a year (in fact, it couldn’t grow exactly that fast because of other rules such as the distance rule, but I just wanted to show that incredibly fast growth is still possible with the current Wot parameters).
Some people would probably like to see that scenario happen, thinking “wow if it goes like this, then we - the people - win the battle!”. But that’s probably an overly confident point of view.
Here is one simple objection: the number of developers needed for a project to be sustainable is directly related to the number of users. One single developer can obviously not handle a million users. You’ll argue that with a million users, more developers would join. The problem is the race between the learning curve of new developers coming in and the growth rate of the user base. If users come in at a rate that is too fast, the current developers cannot handle both the user demands and the training needs of the new developers that come in, and the whole project is at risk of collapsing technically, which indeed would be very bad.
So it seems that the current Wot is actually a very good compromise: it does allow solid and steady growth (at least so far), which is a prerequisite for the longevity of the project.
Of course, it is frustrating for people who don’t already know 5 members, as they can’t get in right now. They either need to be patient, either need to make some efforts by either go and visit existing members (who also move around), either by creating their own local currency, as long as they are ready to maintain it themselves. So they are not “excluded” per se, but as always, freedom doesn’t come for free.
As for your suggestion of “including people in the system before they are included”, that supposes that they emit currency units, which then could go into the economy. What happens if these people were not legit in the first place? This also opens the road to “massive spamming”, and could be very dangerous for the currency. I believe your idea was to disallow these units to be spent, so they would remain on that person’s account until that person is certified. But then, how can we count the current money mass? This is a critical point since the DU itself depends on the money mass.
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This thread has gone completely off topic.
Would someone be so kind as to please address all the points I raised in my list of reasons why it would be beneficial to have some external guidance of the WoT.
And if there is some way to achieve them with Duniter including any possible work arounds if there are no direct ways to do it.
For G1 and other Duniter currencies created by this community everything you say is probably adequate.
For others, who may want to use Duniter as a new community currency, the currency is just a tool or a means to an end and not a project in itself. Therefore, the currency cannot be the “bottleneck” for the growth of the community. It should be the grease that makes things go smoothly.
What I mean is that for a currency to be useful it should be easy to use and fit within the constructs of community. If the community can’t grow because of technical limitation of the currency then that’s a problem.
I will also wait for responses from core developers.
If there is no interest in the problems I’ve defined (even if the solution is different from what I’ve proposed) then I’m probably looking at the wrong currency 
The clearest way I can think of to express what I’m looking for would be:
An additional type of WoT member who has different rules for joining. They should receive dividends just like everyone else but they may have more frequent certification periods and different requirements for being certified. There would be a simple and fast way to add someone like this.
The problem to be solved:
A simple way to allow people to join the WoT on a probationary basis.
I don’t think a central database is absolutely required to solve the problem; I merely suggested that as an obvious and simple solution. There are probably other ways to solve this while remaining 100% decentralized. I just don’t know what it is and hence the purpose of this thread.
Based on your response, I have two more things to add: