Home - Adelphos, the fractal trust network

IMPORTANT!

Adelphos is in pre-release state.

The planned date of the first release is: Nov. 1st 2026

Before that the documentation and the software will change, please be patient.

40 καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐρεῖ αὐτοῖς, Ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐφ’ ὅσον ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων, ἐμοὶ ἐποιήσατε.

The King will answer them, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
- Matthew 25:40

Foreword

Have you ever imagined a world in which people could simply trust other people like your relatives?

Have you ever thought that sometimes an object could be useful to someone, but the shipping costs outweigh its monetary value?

Have you ever had the feeling that something really important is missing in the abundance of virtual social interactions, that is the feeling that you are part of a family, your family part of other families and so on, until every one of us is part of the bigger family of homo sapiens on Earth?

Adelphos might be not the full answer, but a tool that might render the ultimate goal more reachable.

A trust amplifier

First of all, trust, like love and friendship, escapes a formal definition. For the scope of the project we will define trust (please see the Basic Concepts page, for a quick view and the trust page for an in-depth explanation), but for now we will simply define trust as the amount of monetary credit that you give to another person.

An adelphos is exactly this: a system that aims to amplify the trust that we naturally give to members of our family to bigger and bigger groups of people, until, ideally, we embrace all the world.

Since ancient times humans have invented ways to amplify their powers; fire, weapons, levers, machines, cars, planes, and now computers and A.I. are all tools to enhance various human capabilities, like the ability to lift weights, to travel, to kill, to store and process information.

But no significant steps have made to amplify their capacity to love and to care for other people in a objectively way. Religions, spiritual teaching have done a great deal of work in educating people to care for people far from our perceived reality.

Exiting the family borders trust drops drastically, like the bottom of an ocean; sometimes in small groups trust survives, or, ironically, in “mafia” style families united by crime.

In the ‘civil’ world little has been achieved; wars, oppressions and inequality are still present; we do not fall into the trap of saying that “the past was better”, but certainly it was not “worse”.

Sometimes we are still as we were in the tribes, closed and wary.

But how would it be if we created a system that helped humans to trust each other? We should design a system that is able to mimic the way in which humans care for each other.

This is the core of adelphos, We can define it a trust amplifier.

As a phone is able to carry our voice to the other part of the globe, adelphos is able to up-level our natural trust in the closest circle (the family) to bigger and bigger groups.

This is done by the user themselves who organize themselves (hence the word self-organizing) into bigger structures which are similar to the ones at the lower levels (hence the word fractal).

There have been trials of similar systems, notably the Credit Commons protocol, but they have not had a widespread use probably because they lack the ability to measure trust and to give to end users a closed system which allows them to close the circle from the buyer to the seller, even if they are geographically separated.

Introduction

Adelphos (ἀδελφός, the ancient Greek word for “brother”) is a closed system that enables users to exchange goods and services using a virtual currency. The system is able to handle the shipping too, by using the members of the system as partial carriers of an object from the seller to the buyer, so that no external carrier (like FedEx, DHL, etc.) is needed.

This is why adelphos is closed.

There are other systems like this, as the time banks and the LETS system, which is now evoluted in credit commons which enables system to federate themselves and exchange credit.

The real difference of adelphos between similar systems are:

* Adelphos does the routing of the object, and also the shipping costs
  are handled with the virtual currency, that is it *unifies* the
  *real* and the *virtual*

* Adelphos lets communities of users to share gains and losses, based
  on their "brotherhood" (hence the name).

You can think of it like the union of eBay, Amazon and DHL in the same system, with the added bonus that it is free (free as free speech and free beer), and all of that happens without the use of real money, ever, not even when we ship the object, because the system is a closed ecosystem (closed with respect to the money, open with respect to the people).

A physical router based on a web of trust

The main difference from other similar systems (LETS, CreditCommons, Ripple) is that Adelphos is a closed ecosystem: it does not rely on external carriers: if a user sells an object it creates also the shipping of the item to the buyer using a chain of steps, and the costs of these steps are automatically distributed.

If the idea seems a bit far fetched I will make an example, because it is not so uncommon: you have done it countless of times since you were a boy/girl, but not in a systematic way, and without an external coordinator.

For example Alice borrowed a book from the library and she needs to return it by August 3rd. However, on August 2nd she goes to the seaside for a one week holiday with her boyfriend and she forgets the book in her bedroom. She messages her brother Bob to ask him to take the book to the library for her.

Bob trusts Alice (she is his sister) that the book is not a dangerous or a stolen item or and he agrees to help her.

Alice trusts Bob (he is her brother) that he will actually take the book to the library (and that he won’t lose it, sell it second hand, use it as paper to light a camping fire, etc). Trust is the key. She asks him to do the favour because the cost of trusting his brother is less than the fine she will get if she returns the book one week later

So far so good. But things might no be so simple.

Now, just for the sake of the example, suppose that Bob catches a cold in that day and it rains. The library is 3 miles away and he does not want to cycle in the rain.

But he knows that his friend Charlie studies all the afternoons in the library because he is preparing an exam. Charlie is older than him, he has already a driving licence and probably he will go to the library by car that day.

Charlie lives only half a mile away and he messages him asking if he could take a book from his sister. Charlie agrees but he is in a hurry, and he cannot make the detour to take the book from Bob.

So Bob ultimately asks his mother Danielle to bring the book to Charlie using the car because Alice has forgotten to return it to the library.

Danielle knows that Charlie’s home is on the street to the mall, she needs to buy something for the house, she had already planned to go out, but she agrees to go earlier, takes the book to Charlie who eventually will take it to the library.

In this simple example we have seen that when people trust themselves can act proactively to find optimal or near-optimal routes for objects: in this case Danielle, by anticipating the shopping time, has rendered the return of the object possible, and without any extra cost, because she would have gone to the mall in any case, and Charlie would have gone to the library by car, and Bob is in home, safe and comfy under the blankets.

This example has three shipping steps: one trivial from Bob to his mother (in the same home), from his mother to Charlie, from Charlie to the library.

Of course the example would be contrived, but just for the sake of imagining, you can think of one more step, for example Charlie realizes that that day he does not need to go to the library, but he has taken the pledge to return the book, he feels responsible for it so he takes the book to his friend Elise that will eventually take the book.

You can imagine other steps as you like.

From this example we can extract to important concepts that Adelphos will use.

* In each step the person holding the book is **responsible** to take
  it to the next step.

* The person who started the process (in this case Alice) does not need
  to know all the people who eventually will take her book to the
  library.

From these two observations we can deduce the cardinal routing rule used by Adelphos:

* The shipping of an object will be divided in such a way that in each
  step the person holding the object has taken it from a person he
  trusts and he will deliver it to a person he trusts.

From theory to practice.

Each steps has a dikastes (δικαστής, the Greek word for judge) and a diakonos (διάκονος, the Greek word for servant) who will handle the routing one leg of a time and each leg is registered in the system with its cost.

Adelphos is also able to limit the amount of trust (credit) which we give to the system and that the system gives to us; in this way the seller is limited by the system to only sell until a certain amount (so that his credit is secured) but also the buyer is limited to a certain amount (so that he cannot exploit the system over a certain point).

These limits are changed gradually by the users’ feedback, so the main objective of adelphos is thus to allow users to form an increasingly strong web of trust.

Ownership and Licence

Of course a trust amplifier needs to be trusted: the trust begins from the system. This is why I have decided to license it under the GPL license. In this way the system will remain free and each modification on it must have the same freedom as the initial one.

Adelphos is not owned by anyone. I, Lino Ferrentino, have registered the domain www.adelphos.it, I have rented a Linux server (not very much powerful) where I run on the current version of adelphos and the web server that has uploaded to you the page you are reading.

But, given enough technical capabilities and a modest cost (in domain registration and electricity bill), everyone could start a new instance which can talk to all the others.

Activity Pub and Adelphos

Each Adelphos instance is a federated instance which uses Activity Pub to communicate

Activity Pub has been chosen because:

it is an open standard
it allows the authentication of messages
it saves me from the burden to write an UI, because I rely on Mastodon (the de facto standard in the Fediverse to handle users) to send messages to fediverse users.

Source code

The source code of this instance is available here adelphos-ap

License

The documentation has been released with the Creative Commons 4.0 licence