A new source of weight based on trust

[thumannw]

As far as I have understood, the weight of a node is the staked native token amount in relation to the total staked amount. As this is a good step towards decentralization compared to the original equal weight approach, I think it still has some drawbacks.

• Since there is no slashing, the barrier to becoming lazy, unreliable or even evil is lower than in staking systems with slashing.
• There is no decentralized way of removing nodes which have shown to exercise malicious behavior.
• The rich have more power and get even richer.

It seems that the beautiful mechanism of the hashgraph consensus allows for a extensible definition of node weights. A simple definition based on trust could look as follows. An organization (with identity) operates one or more nodes. An organization can declare to trust other organizations. If T is the total number of such trust declarations in the network, n the number of nodes of a given organization A and t the number of other organizations trusting A, then the weight of each node of A is t/nT.

• An organization's incentive is to be trusted by other organizations because this increases the weight of its nodes and therefore the rewards.
• Trusting other organization will increase the likelihood to be trusted in return.
• Offboarding: If an organization is not anymore trustworthy because of malicious behavior in- or outside of the network, other organizations can simply revoke the trust to that organization and thus decrease the impact of the latter on the network.
• Onboarding: New organizations willing to enter the network can choose "mentors" with which they can sync. In return, these mentor organizations are trusted by the new one, increasing their weight slightly. The new one is not trusted yet, but can prove itself over time, collecting more trust from the community of nodes.

Any new source of weight, like the above one, can be combined with other sources, like the stake, simply by forming a (weighted) mean between the respective weight values. For the status quo, we can assume that every organization trusts any other. So when combining the trust weight with the stake weight, the node's weights equalize slightly, but the order is retained. So this could be acceptable in a migration.

Has this idea already been formulated somewhere? Is it of any value or completely off?