But part of the beauty of the current financial system is that most of the time if I use a trusted intermediary, I can confidently engage in financial transactions without having to build up a trust history.
Again, not sure how this matters as it seems like you are going down a path that is unrelated to the actual protocol. There has been discussion of Ripple on the agile banking list and other payment systems that rely on intermediaries, and OpenTransact could be used in those systems, but the issue is not inherent in the protocol alone.
