-- At 12:14 PM 3/1/2001 -0900, Daniel J. Boone wrote:
So far, all of the ideas I have come up would require a relatively stable system for recording reputation capital and associating it with nyms. I haven't figured out a protocol for doing THAT without it becoming a point of attack for the decentralized market system.
EBay's primary asset is that it is a repository of reputation capital for buyers and sellers. Naturally it will attempt to capitalize on that asset, taking a share of the value generated by your reputation capital, and naturally the state will attempt to confiscate that asset, and "correct" the information in that asset, to punish certain people and groups and reward other people and groups. Misbehave, perhaps by selling thought crime products, and your reputation capital will be expunged. Or, if you are a member of a protected group, unfavorable comments will be expunged. Therefore, in the long run, people will find it more profitable to control the reputation information that they generate -- we will need a peer to peer reputation system. Proposed system: When I transact with someone, the auction client on my computer generates a record, containing proof of some parts of that transaction, signed by myself and the other party, stored on my computer. By default I make that record public. If I like, I can add any comments I please to that record. A key problem is that people need to look all this stuff up. This requires indexing servers that keep track of all or most such records. However we can have multiple indexing servers, which spider through such transaction records. Thus the spider might start with me, and find all the people that I made public transactions with, and then for each of those people, find all the people that they made public transactions with. A spider exercises no monopoly power, since anyone can set up a spider. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG MQrHOcZ42QomrtqWpHa5yFOd2cJ7Q1nP4/RpMmLU 4IAi3ZRjN5ygCUfAKEIcHx/++oYWJoNr6TrN6ZJ+C