jamesd@netcom.com (James A. Donald) writes:
Hal seems to be asking questions which implicitly define a reputation to be some kind of credential.
I tried to post something on this last night, but Toad apparently hiccupped and lost it. My suggestion was that we do not discuss "reputations", where I think James is right that the term already refers to an opinion someone holds in his mind, but rather "reputation capital" or perhaps "reputation credentials", which are information structures which may be used to establish or support a reputation. The example I used last night was that "reputation capital" is not "reputation" any more than the "liberty bell" is "liberty". Then perhaps we can avoid arguing about what a reputation is, and instead focus on the interesting issue of what the role of cryptography will be in establishing reputations in a possibly-pseudonymous business network. Hal