Decentralized Markets

[James A. Donald]

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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
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