Assurance
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By members of a trust group working in contract together as a Platform, the group a a whole can absorb losses or failures of it's members allowing them all to more easily maintain a good trust rating. For example, if two untrusted parties traded a service and then at some point the seller called in payment of the resulting account but the buyer was unable to come up with the money at that point in time, the loss of that failure would be temporarily distributed amongst his trust group. This way his rating in the financial dimension of trust is maintained, but has the potential to drop within the context of his own trust group if he can't repay his members in accord with their own internal agreements. If he were continually badly behaved he may be rejected from his trust group, and then his trust rating would be affected making it more difficult to become a member in other trust groups.
Initially, "Policies of Assurance" grew out of The Doctrine of Contribution and General Average, which is found in the Codes of the ancient Rhodians. In the Platform network, the cost of failure to meet obligations can be distributed amongst the members of a trust group allowing it to exhibit a higher level of trust than any of the individual members have alone.
