**TL;DR: Use curation voting as a proxy for trust. This eliminates explicit trust-voting, and leverages the solid engagement we already have with curation voting.**

Something like this proposal sounds like the right way to go. Here's my thought: requiring people to pick 30 people they know and vote for them sounds like a recipe for people to get "stuck" in positions that they shouldn't be in. We've seen this over and over again in Bitshares where a witness needs to be voted out, but the only way to do it is for whales to coordinate. **Why don't you make the voting implicit?** We already have active voting on the network in the form of people voting for articles. It should be possible to leverage that voting activity to build an account-rank. 

Here's a flippant, poorly-thought-out implementation: 
1. Everybody has a "seed" account rank determined by something like their SP.
1. We track the last week's worth of votes cast by each account, and make a list of the top 60 accounts voted for by each account
1. Then, you multiply the # of votes cast for each account by each account's account-rank, and the result is that account's new account-rank.

It doesn't sound computationally intensive; there aren't any matrix inverses or anything like you have in page-rank. You'd have to check if the algorithm converges and all that.