Bitcoin Forum

I just started offering to take BTC and I'm looking for a reputation management tool that is considered trustworthy. Any suggestions?

I actually provide a real service and plan to get a good reputation for it, like I do with ebay. Is there a good service out there for this already?

The #bitcoin-otc marketplace features its Web of Trust (WoT) for recording and viewing trust history:

 - http://www.Bitcoin-OTC.com

#bitcoin-otc sounds interesting, I will have to check that out.

Yes, the WoT is where it's at.

what service are you providing if you dont mind me asking

Yes, the pirate and the pedophile Mircea Popescu started there. Everybody can spend 10 BTC and buy some ratings.

Right. It truly means nothing. I'm more likely to use my ebay account than a bitcoin-spawned service.

At least, today.

In that case what exactly are you doing here?

Just spreading the truth, you little pedophile.

Your obsession with pedophily and child porn is very very creepy. Whatever thread I open about whatever topic, there's a guy in there screaming about pedophiles and child porn and it is always you. Is this a thing like those violent gay-haters that are secretly gay or what? Anyone else strike this as odd?

Sellin' surplus and lookin' for next generation reputation and identity management experiments.

You?

The Web Of Trust is a good tool.  more worthwhile than a simple rating score is the ;;gettrust rating that will show how connected you are to someone else (i.e. the people you have shown trust in that trust this person).  always note who has rated a person, not just their score.

http://wiki.bitcoin-otc.com/wiki/OTC_Rating_System#Notes_about_gettrust
http://serajewelks.bitcoin-otc.com/trustgraph.php

of course this is not foolproof. Nothing is. A chameleon can play nice in the community for as long as necessary to build a reputation.

Right?

OTC is valueless for a ton of reasons. You can pay people to rank you, there is no attached identity management (even an anonymous identity), and it is in no way accessable. It also isn't kept clean, such as

http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=Coolio-&sign=ANY&type=RECV

This entry has multiple +10 rankings that are obviously accidents
15160    TheBitcoinFox    -9    Coolio-    2012-09-25 13:32:35    10    ripped off 600$ in moneypacks from a newby!
15168    insanebit    -8    Coolio-    2012-09-25 13:39:42    10    ripped off moscowr 600$ moneypack

Both entries, of course, known sock puppets in the system and yet still being tallied

The person stolen from has an entry here:
15111    MoscowR    1    Coolio-    2012-09-25 22:55:29    1    thanks for mp->btc exchagne

I assume you can only leave one entry for someone, so MoscowR couldn't change this from a suggestion to a -10?

In short, it doesn't... suit my needs.

Like I said, I'm more likely to point people to my ebay profile right now until something new comes along (or something old is re-appropriated).

You can't pay people that matter to rank you. The WoT is a Web of Trust not a Sum of Trust.

Ok. What is the system being used in all of this that indicates who matters? The only entity management in all this appears to be Freenode's NickServ,  userprofileID / name on this forum, and a handful of strange startup stock markets. Is it a personal case-by-case judgement? If so, that's ok; but if there is another system being worked on I'd like to hear about it. To use.

My point stands about the entry by MoscowR earlier, if that works the way it appears if I trusted MoscowR (and maybe filtered out all feedback from non-trusted reviewers) I would think that this user was vouched. Can he change that entry on his own or....?

See, this is the thing, people dissing the WoT don't really know how it works. So:

I. The only way to enter ratings is being registered with gribble. The only way to register with gribble is to answer a cryptographic challenge it issues, and the only way to do that is to hold the secret key for the respective gnupg keypair. Therefore, the only person that can use a name is the person that holds the specified keypair (on the page of that name you have a link anchored on "GPG identity"). This identification is as strong as Bitcoin itself, and that's why it makes for such a good solution.

II. The WoT is really an investment. It is slow to start off, but becomes exponentially more useful with your usage. At first you don't know anyone, so in principle it's difficult to make any judgments. Maybe you might know some of the names there, from other venues, and you can establish relations by talking to them, and in that case also acquire at least part of their trust list. Maybe you don't, in which case you start small, try to hedge your bets. You look to see who your op is being trusted by and who they trust. After you've made a few deals, you've started to recognize the names, you start giving them weight in your head.

III. The mistakes you can make are principally to think "trust" can be added, and so someone who received 50 trust brownies is more trustworthy and someone who received 5 trust brownies is less trustworthy. This is wrong (the trust points are not at all equal), and not the correct way to use that value.

The value only gives some indication of how likely you are to know someone who knows them. That is all. A user with 100 trust is about 10 times more likely to be trusted by someone you know than a user with 10 trust for the very simple statistical reason that you need at least 10 people to get 100 trust. This is the correct use of total trust: to compare the list of how many people you trust that rated the person with how large his trust is. A user with 100+ trust that you can't find was trusted by anyone in your list is suspect for this reason. Sure, it may be the case that he trades widgets and you trade nuggets, and he only knows people in the widget market and you only know people in the nugget market. But it's also possible that he's faked his trust. You have to decide which.

This is the great boon of the WoT: surely for sporadic deals in the 10-100 dollar range entered in among people that will never meet again something like Amazon Ratings works just fine. However, the WoT currently supports recurring deals among players with multi-million dollar balances of trade. That's quite a gap there, and half-baked systems like Amazon's don't scale. How is this possible? Well, it's possible precisely because the WoT is so fine and so interpretable. You want to deal with someone you've never met but has a high sum rating? Ok, are any people you know in his list? Ok, who? Then you can talk to them, and ask "what about X?" and they'll tell you what they did, bought coins, sold a motorboat, lent them $150k of mining gear, whatever. Sure, all this complex reasoning might seem like it's not worth it at the beginning. However, unlike any alternative it actually allows you a lot of space to grow.

Now, the only seeming breach to date was pirate's, who managed to get the trust of the vast majority of trusted people over the course of about a year. But the thing is, the WoT isn't intended to decide whether a person is trustworthy. Only you can decide that. The WoT is there to put the person in context, to make them visible to you. It was plain impossible for anyone using the WoT to not know what pirate was all about. Now, once knowing that, if you trusted him or not is your problem, not really the WoT's. All the WoT says is, hey, there's this guy, 58 people know him, have dealt with him, received money so and so. Put that together with the knowledge that he runs a "mysterious business" paying 3000% APR and you've got your answer plain.

In short for the tl;dr crowd: the WoT doesn't work by itself. The WoT is just the tool that allows you to do the work, and it's by a fat margin the best tool to date. Sure, you may be too lazy to use the tool, and that's fine. Doesn't however change what it is.

Any registered person (gpg authenticated, or using a bitcoin address authentication) can rate someone else. And yes, one can change the ratings they give.  There are sockpuppets in play, so be skeptical of ratings - especially from newer or low-rated accounts.

Just as valuable as the WOT is the IRC channel, which is interactive.  A few conversations, asking questions and getting feedback, or even just observing, can reveal good information about the various players.  When in doubt, ask someone. 

If you don't know how to work the commands (they are a bit esoteric, but manageable), ask. 
If you wonder about someone's reputation, ask.
Want to know more about bitcoin, ask.

I agree that there are many issues with trust in the community, as the scammers are plentiful and newer users are jumping in with very little context and information.  While the WOT is not foolproof, my best suggestion at this point is to engage others interactively, check the WOT and Gettrust ratings, and start with small, manageable risks.

[some ways to improve the system might be to create a trading protocol that proactively forces people to check that the other user is authenticated, forces them to read that user's ratings, recommends getting feedback from a more experienced trader, mentioning potential escrow services, etc.]

Just got directed to this thread from another in another section, so while it may seem necro to the locals in this section it is fresh elsewhere.

I would like to add that I think a lot of people have the wrong impression about IRC, possibly because of things like "Instant Messenger" which have somehow led them to think chat is about instant response.

IRC is, to many, especially old-timers, rather something one leaves on 24/7 and where usually if you have a question someone with an answer will get back to you when they have woken up, gotten around to sitting at their computer for their computing-shift whatever hour of day or night that might be where you are or where they are, taking care of all the stuff they need to get out of the way before settling down to read, and read up on what has been said while they were asleep / away / etc.

It is also something in which you can have umpteen channels open at once, which is part of why you don't want graphics and such that eat a lot of bandwidth, you want simple concise plan text so a whole bunch of channels makes takes only a tiny part of your bandwidth.

Once you are in umpteen channels you realise you are not going to have time to read everything that happened on every channel while you were away, but that doesn't matter. For one thing, everying there who notices who is there knows you could have been watching at any time and could watch at any time, your comings and goings are due to your client sometimes losing connection while you sleep and automatically connecting, and due to all your channels being opened when you boot up your machine (after some problem or upgrade-needed forced you to have to reboot it).

Thus you have permanent presence as a lurker, and at any time you can peek into any of the channels you are in with your comings and goings being announced on the channel. You can switch from your browser to your IRC client from time to time while spending time on the forum, just peek, see if anything interesting is going on. Some people are "live" in some channels so you do quite often get to watch "live" interactions.

IRC "posts" are usually less wordy than forum posts, which can also bring "character" to life much in the way the pithy very sketchy characterisation in the "J" thread of the Old Testment created literary characters vivid/clear enough to carry across the centuries, characterisation possibly not out-done until Shakespeare.  

Seriously, just set up an IRC client and leave it on a few months, see if it doesn't "grow on you" over time even just as something that is always there to peek at, to peek into the "lives" of the people behind the numbers on the OTC web of trust.

Note that many of them can also be observed in various other channels too... :)

-MarkM-

A good bump seems in order.