Bitcoin Forum

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If I had to pick the best concept of bitcoin - it would be of it's irreversible nature - not it's privacy.

Demanding privacy on an irreversible transaction is just a warning sign to me.   I did the majority of my bitcoin commerce with people and entities that were known.  Very rarely did I enter into any agreements with people who demanded they stay anonymous.


How would you battle against the fraud of making multiple (few, dozens, hundreds) of multiple accounts?  The forum would be quickly overrun with fraud since the honest people would have the one account and fighting against the scammer with many.  So, no, the reputation system would not work just the same.

This is a privately owned centralised forum. If you want a decentralised one you should make one or wait for one to be made. I don't think it'll work as well as people imagine though much like your suggestion for the trust system. You can also create your own trust lists and remove and add anyone you wish so I guess you can argue it is decentralised.

This is exactly why the reputation system needs to stay somewhat centralized. If it were to become decentralized in a similar way that the Bitcoin network is decentralized then the scammers would appear trustworthy and the people who will act honestly will look like scammers. This will result in almost all trades resulting in some kind of scam, or scam attempt which will make people not want to use bitcoin.

A prime example of this is the sheer number of websites out there that are scams that accept bitcoin but appear trustworthy to the average person.

You would battle it by building your own trust list, one person at a time.  A decentralized network wouldn't need to mean that all feedback is equally values, it would simply mean that each user chooses which feedback to value.  If default trust were removed tomorrow, I imagine that a huge number of people would immediately add badbear, tomatocage, vod, dooglus, etc, etc to their trust lists.  The difference between that and what we have today is that everyone who did that would suddently know who they were trusting and what their reasons were for doing so, rather than being handed a crutch to lean on which is probably going to fail them if they start leaning too hard.

I would imagine that in such a scenario, over time, several tightly knit trust sub-networks might develop, and who knows, people might start choosing which trust network to "buy" into based on individual motivations and perceptions about those networks.  But the crucial thing is that these networks would develop organically based on actual experineces of the forum users,  rather than being imposed by a central, overworked authority which is subject to manipulation.

A case in point for this kind of reasoning is that even bringing up such ideas will get you shouted at (often by people on default trust).  I was told in no uncertain terms by someone on default trust list that arguing for a different sort of trust system is tantamount to promoting scams an fraud---and that's not the worst of it, but I wont' go on further on that now.

There's another important point here, you don't have to go whole-hog. You could start with some small changes which would encourage users to interact with and build their own trust lists.  A simple first step would be to change the overblown "warning: trade with extreme caution" to "this user has received negative feedback from someone in your trust list".  That kind of change would encourage users to try to figure out what their trust list is, and how they can use it.


You're right, hilarious, in principle.  But in implementation, it's a bit of a fail.  Everyone is invited to create their own trust list and to set the depth they wish to see in that list.  But in practice, almost no one does this, so, because trust depth default is 2, unless you're in the depth 1, it doesn't matter to anyone who you've put in your trust list, and changing your trust list just amounts to not seeing what everyone else sees.  

dserrano5 said here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1103508.msg11747205#msg11747205) that default trust wasn't supposed to last, but was added as a bootstrap mechanism so that the trust network wasn't terribly empty and sparse before people had a chance to create their own lists.  The current system is a far-cry from that scenario, I think there are reasonably and concrete ways to improve the system.  I hope that they'll be more seriously considered given all the abuses we've seen of the trust system by an (admittedly small) number of folks associated with it.

EDIT: for reference, a similar topic was discused here some months previously: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1031791.0

Could you point out some?

There are plenty of users with clean trust/feedback here. If you just stick to trading legitimate things you never have an issue. It is rare that people get negative trusted when they are 100% legit here. You allegedly sent back a $1300 item with no proof of tracking...how could people not be skeptical? I think the trust system is not perfect, but it does work. 

Um, yes.  You can't just ignore a 5 paragraph response and quote the summary sentence at the bottom and pretend that nothing else was written. ???

See especially paragraph #3 of your [snip]. 
See the OP of this thread. 
See the reference thread I linked to in the bottom of the post.

I think the idea of turtlehurricane is exploitable because scammer simply would have to build a lot of accounts and spam all negative ratings away. Or give positives all the way from the start.

I escrowed a lot accounts and i got the feeling that some people on here hold a lot of accounts. Account farmers and traders and obviously scammers that create accounts very often. They would get an enourmous power with these accounts.

We know that nearly no user is bothering with changing something on the trust list so i wonder if tspacepilot's idea will work. In fact i like his idea of adding those people to default trust that you trust. Then you can trust their reviews.

In practice that woul no work because people wouldn't bother to add someone in 98% of all cases. And next thing is that you never could add as much users as are on default trust. Which means you will miss a lot scam alerts. Since you surely don't want to add those users that add their negative rating to everyone who appears in scam accusations. Because that often enough are accounts that are levelled up to make a scam at one point in time.

If it was done right it wouldn't matter because people wouldn't care about untrusted feedbacks any more than they do today.  The difference would be that the trusted feedbacks that appear on a trust page would be ones that you actually chose as trusted, and not ones handed to you by someone you might or might not agree with.

Indeed, but you don't mean adding them to default trust, you mean adding them to your trust list.

But this is a failure of the default settings.  If the default settings were blank, the first thing people would ask is "what am I supposed to do with these trust settings?"  Who knows, maybe a sticky thread would get created which basically said, if you don't know what to do with your trust settings, add "badbear" and "quickseller".  In any case, I think that educating people about the decentralized potential of the trust system would be a wonderful step forward from the problematic top-down system that exists currently.


But surely anyone who wants to see the "scam alerts" can subscribe to the scam accusations subforum and add all the users they like from that section into their trust list.

I know what you mean and i would find that being a better trust system. Only i think it would not work because i'm very sure that 95% of the users would not bother with these settings. I mean until some weeks ago i never bothered with the trust levels too. The user would simply use their accounts without trusted users. I mean why spending all the time when you only want to take part on the forum? That would not work.

Of course you could make this mandatory. Every new user would be forced to chose at least 10 trusted persons. Maybe showing a list with the most trusted users so that they can chose from. But they would not know most of them. Trusting them would mean being lucky. And that list could be exploited by having account farmers trust one of their account.

On top you would have never as many users in your trust list than users are in default trust nowadays.

I really don't see how this can be made to work. As a result it would mean way more scams happening, making it easier for scammers on the way. And it would not solve the issue with wrong rating. For example if you don't trust quicksellers ratings then you would drop them. But many would take him which means for the negatively rated user it would not make a difference because he would still be read for most users.

Is there any user here whom the majority of the community consider trustworthy?

I think thats the real problem with the trust system, there is a lack of trustworthy users on bitcointalk. I guess message boards aren't a good way to trade. Even anonymous marketplaces like Silk Road don't have as many scammers because of the escrow system.

There are plenty of trusted users here, but the amount of scammers really sucks. I think a big issue we have is sold accounts these days. I have seen a lot of positive trusted accounts being sold which makes trusting people even harder. I could list out at least 20 people I would feel comfortable sending coins to upfront.

I rarely see issues overall with the current system - no matter what any system will have flaws. Just use escrow and your chances of getting burned are very low.

Well the point is the default trust system is meant to consist of trustworthy people. If people used trusted escrows here there would be a hell of a lot less scams, but escrows, especially the one on Silk Road, can always be abused by scammers too. I'm sure dealers had a lot of problems with people claiming their stuff never arrived. I'm sure the opposite happened too (dealers not sending things out). Who you gonna complain to when you don't receive your drugs?

@Quickseller, please stop derailing this thead.  This is the thread you're looking for: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1163098.0


This is the centralized, top-down version of the trust system which the de-facto one.  However, given this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=914641.0) and this reply (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1103508.msg11747205#msg11747205) among others, it doesn't seem like the centralized view was intended.  It seems like it was an implementation error.  So, default trust has become equivalent to standard trust has become equivalent to "the trust system".  But I don't think it has to be that way and it seems that many others agree.

You're absolultely right about this.  But it's not clear to me that enshrining a select few people special "green lights" does anything at all to educate people or encourage them to be smart.  It seems to do quite the opposite, leaving people with a false sense of security based on the idea that "the trust system" will take care of them.

I find it kind of odd that some user's trust ratings count more than others, that their feedback is displayed by default. I would rather that they all be displayed on the trust page in a person's profile. Separate, but still. Gotta say, I agree with Vod, the problem is that there are people with several accounts, people with several accounts out to scam people... so we gotta keep it in mind.

Forum funds should be used to pay for an airship that endlessly roams the Earth. Inside is a room where transactions take place that is lined with tasers and machine guns. Once everyone is happy they're released. If there's a problem then it gets messy. That's the only way to guarantee trust via the forum. The rest is all potentially corruptible.

It is odd.  The idea of the trust settings was that people should decide for themselves who's feedback to value, unfortunately, an implementation error has led to a special few who are encharged with 'looking out for the rest of us'.  Some of them dont' really seem to want this responsibility, others have fought like wolverines to try to get it.  I have sympathy for the former group and distrust for the latter.
 
Some of those people are using many account to game the "standard trust" list itself.  Hopefully, we'll see a change sometime soon.


Not that I don't appreciate satire, but that sort of non-sequitur sorta just killed the discussion.  Thanks.  Clearly there are earthly options which improve on the status-quo.  Hopefully we can try out some of them soon.

The problem with having all trust ratings equal would be trust spamming. Although a user may be very reputable, if all trust ratings from all accounts were worth the same amount, someone could ruin their reputation with just a few, brand new accounts. Having all trust ratings equal doesn't make sense to me, I think the system works fairly well right now but obviously there will always be some problems with whatever trust system is implemented.

This has been offered up before, but it's just a red-herring.  Getting rid of default trust <-> standard trust doesn't mean that all ratings are equal, it means that each user decides who to trust and who not to trust.  If you make 100 accounts and trust spam with them, how are you going to get those 100s of accounts onto anyone's trust list?

The idea isn't that every feedback has equal weight for everyone across the board, the idea is that each individual decides how to weigh the feedback from each person they encounter.

Note: this was already answered upthread, if we have to keep rehashing the same failed arguments, the conversation just doesn't go anywhere...

oh, I don't know.... maybe the same way the people you're complaining about got on to default trust? only it would be MUCH easier.  ::)

Account farm. Couple of legit deals, more then likely small / mini trades, get trust, add trust from that account to your other. Repeat. See what I'm saying?

Ideas and suggestions are great and all, But I believe bitcointalk.org has one of the fanciest reputation systems when it comes to forums software. If you remember the old scammer tag, that was the real centralised system.

Even though I've been burned in the past, I like the system. You can have your own trust network and if you're added to the list of a high ranking member your list might be part of the default.

[jk]I'd say that it's a very anarchocapitalist trust system[/jk]

Sweet!  The eyeroll smiley, now your point is truly proven.


I think I see what you're saying.  And if I do understand you correctly you're pretty much bass-ackwards on the facts.  It's actually a lot easier to farm trust when there's one central top to the trust hierarchy.  In a distributed network, the only people that you're going to potentially get to trust from  are the ones that you're doing these legit deals with.  If all of your trading partners have their own trust lists which aren't necessarily pointing towards the same top of the pyramid then again, your "trust farming" scenario is a lot harder to pull of than it is right now.  As it is right now, you only have to convince one of the 10 or so blessed individuals on default standard trust in order to make you one of the blessed.  In a distributed network, the system is much more robust to this because there's no central point of failure.



worhiper_-_, you're right that the software allows you to have your own trust network, the real issue is the standard trust list which ends up seen by everyone as the de facto truth.  Presumably, we didn't get all these fancy features for setting up individual trust lists just so that they should be ignored.

and you then can leave trust to your other accounts and repeat until a few of those accounts have enough trust to scam, no? Just like what default trust list members can do now.....

I'll admit the system is fucked but there is not much that can be done. Either way, the system is going to get manipulated. Not trying to argue that default trust is better, I'm just saying what you suggested can be manipulated just as easy if not easier giving time.

You absolutely should not add someone to your trust list only because you have traded with them in the past. You should add someone to your trust list because you trust their opinions and because you are confident they will maintain a list of others who have solid opinions.

What happens all too often is that when people do small trades, they will be able to get the people they are trading with to add them to their trust network. We saw this many times with a number of scammers, moreia had several accounts (TheGambler, moreia, and spoodermen) that still are on several people's trust list, and the same is true for puzzel.me. When you get one account onto the trust network of someone who is on many other's trust networks, then you would be able to get all of your alt accounts into a large number of other's trust network. This would allow you to give trust to your various alt accounts and make them all look reputable when in fact they have never been involved in any trades.

There is also the issue of who new users of the community should have on their trust list. New users would have no idea who is reputable and who is not without some kind of default trust list, and any kind of score system that is completely decentralized would be easily manipulatable (see my above examples, plus the fact that the shills who were previously attacking dogie all are on a large number of account's trust lists, only that they all belong to the same group of people). This would result in trust farming scammers to be able to easily appear reputable when they are not.

A completely decentralized trust system would also be much more vulnerable to the long con. People like maidak would be able to make their alt account appear reputable after they have pulled off a large scam which would allow them continue to scam after their most trusted account has negative trust. It should be noted that users will not update their trust list anywhere nearly as often as they update their trust (it is not quite as visible), and that maidak is still on many user's trust lists.

I don't think so; but maybe I'm misunderstanding you.  I imagine that very few people would have their trust depth set so deep that someone trusting their alts and trusting their alts and so on would make any difference.  Keep in mind that there's a difference between positive/negative feedback and being on a trust list.  

Furthermore, I suggest that if the trust system weren't so centralized, there would be less of a such thing as "enough trust to scam" in general.  In order to have "enough trust to scam" user A, you'd have to actually b on user A's trust list (or th trust list of someone user A trusts, depending on A's depth).  But getting onto any particular users' trust list wouldn't be very easy because there's no central "trust bank" that's going to make you look good in everyone's eyes (as there is now).  Do you see this?

Switching to a better system is one thing that could be done.   We have all these nice tools for making a decentralized trust system, what's missing is the education to know how to use them.  

Have you see this?  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=914641.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=914641.0)

It's not perfect but it shows that Theymos is looking for ways to get people to take a more active approach towards managing their trust lists.

Nope, user A would need to have trust from people in user B's trust list.

The more decentralized the trust system gets, the higher depth users would be advised to keep their trust settings at in order to have a sufficiently large trust network.

If I wanted to scam user A, then User B would only need to use Account B1 to trade with user A, ask to be put in their trust list, then put 100 of my own alts in my own trust list, give Account B2 positive trust from those 100 accounts that are in account B1's trust list, then attempt a large deal with user A from Account B2. Significantly easier to scam then with the current trust system

Who's user B?

Unless they're not interested in trust, maybe they don't trade and they don't want to be pulled into the drama.  The point of a decentralized network is that users are advised to take their fate into their own hands, to be responsible for themselves and to construct relationships based on experience.  Particular characteristics of the topology of such a network is an empirical question, and given the weakenesses and central points of failure in the current pyramid of standard trust, it's time to take a close look at how to encourage people to start using the tools that the forum gives them.

Hard to explain right now, here is a simpler version:

Member A does a few mini transactions with Member B and receives trust.
Member A continues to trade with others and receives more positive feedback.
While this is happening, Member A also leaves positive feedback to his alts, mixed in with legit feedback for trades done, making them appear more legit.
Member B and others start to trust not only Member A but also his trust ratings (not a good idea but it happens ALL the time around here).
Member B gets scammed by an alt of Member A, not knowing it was an alt of someone they have trusted. They made the mistake of trusting another member because someone they trusted left that member positive feedback several times. Member B also has left positive feedback for other legit members Member A has dealt with, making the feedback Member A left his alt appear normal and trustworthy.

Long term con. Just what can happen with the default list now. No different.

I've been buying and selling here for awhile now and know how some new and older members think. So think again before you say members don't trust others members because of positive feedback left. I know this for a FACT, as I get messages basically saying "I see you have trust from so and so, i can send first, send me your address?". I also get messages from others asking basically why they shouldn't trust members I have traded with and left positive feedback.

I'm a little tired so the above might not have come out right. You can see what I'm trying to say though. Something needs to change but what you suggested won't work IMO.

A scammer who farms trust

I'm not trying to be dense, but I don't see this at all.  First of all, are you user B?  How many people are in your scenario?  It looks like three people:

A, B, QS

You say:

1) A trusts B1.
2) QS trusts QS1...QS100
3) QS1...QS100 trusts B2.
4) B1 trusts QS1...QS100
5) B2 tries to scam A

How does that help?  A trusted B1.  If A has trust-depth=1 then A still only trusts B1 no matter what other shenanigans QS and B are trying.

It looks like you're trying to set up a chain of trusts with:

A -> B1 -> QS1...QS100 -> B2

But it seems like A would need trust depth of 3 for this to even be a chance.  And even then, who says that user A is going to trust anyone in his trust list without doing escrow or due-dillegence?  I think you're grasping at straws here.

I fixed your quote to more accurately the name of the scammer. 

Depth 1 would be far too small of a trust network. However depth one would mean that TSP1...TSP100 would be in A's trust network.

Your trust network is the tool that you use to conduct due diligence. If you say to use escrow, then how will someone know who is advisable to use as escrow? You would use your trust network, you could easily have the trust ratings from TSP1...TSP100 reflect that B2 was acting as escrow for large trades. Then you use account B3 (with neutral trust) trade with user A for a large trade and scam user A (to fulfill your requirement to use escrow, however it might as well be A trading with B2).

B1 = B2 = B3 = TSP1...TSP100

I'll agree with tspacepilot on his point that the way default trust is implemented it's used by nearly everybody. IMO there's should me more encouragement and guidance for members to either edit the basic list or form their own. Even if you're on your own network that you've carefully formed, you can't easily get away from default trust since everyone else would be using it. That's unless you're on top of the list where forming your own worthy list is encouraged.

Even when you could bug a user so bad that, at some point, he will setup his personal list of persons he trust, you most probably need to provide something as a guideline. For example most trusted persons on the forum.

Following from that you would have nothing won since the same persons would be on trust again since newbies don't know who to trust.

If newbies don't do that initial setup then they will fall every scam pretty easy.

And another thing is that the red trusts that are rated are often only single individuals. Comparing that to having even 10 users on your personal trust list would mean that a lot of scammers would stay unmarked since the amount of users on default trust, being able to mark a scammer, should be way higher.

Which means risk

Saying that... i don't think many can deal with default trust good. I recently saw someone on default trust giving red trust for... "Reviving an 2 year old thread". ::) Unbelieveable i think. What a scammer, what damage.

Don't understand that behaviour. The thread is deleted already by the way, the rating remains... ::)

You don't get any style points for being an asshole.  You are the one talking about "me", "I", etc.  I'm just trying to follow your reasoning.

You can continue to try to describe increasingly complex and unlikely scenarios in which you say it becomes easier to scam than it is currently, but we all know exactly why you argue against a change: it would mean that you would lose power.  You've been fighting like a rabid dog to increase your power around here for quite a while now, what you're planning to do with this power in the long game, we don't know yet.  I find that people who are desperately hungry for power should be "trade with extreme caution" people, to say the least.

I encourage a robust system in which people take responsibility for themselves and not one with only a few central points of failure.

Make it something like only the admins are in level one trust list, and whoever are in their list to level 2. I personally don't want it extended to so many people around. ;)

Though i think it's rare that an admin or a moderator is giving red trust. They mostly don't have so much time to investigate scams.

The next thing would be that someone might become a moderator who is not liked so much. I mean did you read all the attacks against badbear and other moderators? There are a lot who don't like them. And this could be worse with a more controversial user becoming an admin or moderator. We would be at where we are now.