Trust issues once again

I wrote about it several times, but yet again, misplaced trust have cost some 200 systems to Nulli and 500B to TLC.

EVE is not real. In real life you have one life and it's precious to you. Going out to "awox" is pretty trivial, you just grab a kitchen knife and stab random people on the street. But sooner or later the cops come and either shoot you on site or you'll be arrested and spend the rest of your life in jail. This makes random awox fun a bit less lucrative. Spies in real life also made huge impact, like delivering the US nuke secrets to the Soviets. They got in the electric chair though.

On the other hand in EVE you have alts. If you steal huge amount of money, you can come out clean by simply biomassing the thief character. The victims of the awox, suicide gank or corp theft are completely unable to retaliate to the "real you". For this reason you must never ever trust anybody. How can you operate then? By clear trades and placing people of position into the position of personal risk. Let me explain it via a rental system that could prevent the S2N disaster. Currently the PvP alliance "owned" the system and several people managed it. Let's turn it upside down: the manager "owns" N systems. He rents it out, the rental income is his. As he clearly can't protect it, he pays a security payment to the PvP alliance. In step by step:

1. Alliance owns systems.
2. Guy pays upfront cost to get the systems. Scams can be prevented by using either third party escrow or giving systems one by one. He gets one system, pays for it, gets next.
3. Now the guy owns the systems. If the alliance betrays him, they have to grind it back and lose credibility. Alliances can't easily be remade like alts as members can choose to not move with the leaders.
4. Guy either rents them out or uses the systems himself, either way getting income.
5. From time to time he pays security payment for the alliance to protect him. If the alliance doesn't protect him, he lost one payment only.

What about the own assets of the alliance? They can be owned by several members. If one or two goes rogue, he can only cause small problems and not drop the sov in regions. Every alliance asset can (and should) be in private hands of people who paid for them. This way thefts are impossible as you can't steal your own assets. An "alliance asset" that is managed by someone is a loot waiting to be taken.