Trust is tricky in distributed systems. It introduces subjectivity which can be manipulated and tends to discriminate in uneven and unintended ways. But it could allow trusted peers to pay lower sybil fees which should make the network healthier as a whole.

Brink researchers released a paper using a trust+sybil fee approach. Other proposals have escalating fees when abuse is detected.

Sharing because it’s interesting, but SN uses a trust+sybil fee approach to deal with a similar class of problems. I was surprised to learn people were independently exploring trust+sybil fee for the lightning network itself.