@Paulab, did someone join you by e-mail ?
I don’t feel the most legitimate to represent the Duniter project, but if noone answered, i may definitely explain the basic concepts.
Furthermore, any newcomer must be at a maximum distance of 5 different connections from « referent members », which can be thought of as more central and highly trusted seed identities. Referent members are defined by a graph property that intends to mimic trust parameters of real world, human, social graphs.
Referent members are only more connected to the WoT than the other members. This is not really a question of “trust in real relationship”, nor is it a “better” trust that the owner of the identity is indeed a human. This is more that we want the community of members to stay “compact” (I guess there is a graph theory term for that).
I don’t get what “seed identities” are, but to my understanding this concept would define identities that MUST vouch any newcomer for this newcomer to become a member. This is definitely not what referent members are about.
I would rewrite :
Furthermore, any newcomer must be at a maximum distance of 5 different connections from « referent members », which are strongly connected identities in the Web of Trust, thus represent a central region. This prevents the fraudulent creation of many illegitimate identities.
Little things :
Duniter members have an informal agreement
The agreement is formal, it is a use license that you can find here : https://duniter.org/en/wiki/g1-license/
As of June 2020, Duniter had 3761 members
We are 2800 members this September. We were ~2600 in June. I guess you got this number from g1-stats (which was bugged), and it was the number of all wallets (members and non-members)
You may want to have the reference of the relative theory of money : http://en.trm.creationmonetaire.info/