Bitcoin Forum

Hello guys,
They just let me out of the Newbie section. Hopefully this fits here.

I have two thoughts which I want to share with you:

1) I have an idea for a business. There are two kinds of people: Senders and Receivers (ok, funny).
Senders wish to convert BTC for fiat. Of course there is the problem of irreversibility here. But I'm thinking that Senders specify a certain set of criteria, or a list of requirements for information.

For instance:
A sender can specify that he will only send funds to someone who
- Provides his Facebook account
- Has a good track record on the Bitcoin OTC
- ...

The receiver of funds must provide this information. Of course there can be a lot of different senders with different criteria and the system will find the cheapest alternative.

Which brings me to my next question

2) Is there any good reputation system that is widely used?
I think this is one of the core dilemmas with Bitcoin in practical usage terms.

I use the Bitcoin OTC regularly but it would be cool with beautifully looking service, with API and such so that future services can easily integrate it.

Or perhaps something P2P based? Is this possible? I haven't spent much time thinking about it.

OTC ratings are useless unless the trading person is signed in and gpg identified with the bot. It's also useless unless you can look up other users who gave ratings and judge if they are fake. If all else fails you can ask the room which is why it's the best system so far.

For a web app you could do the same thing with Yubikeys or other 2FA, but you can't ask a room of people if DerpMaster(+10) has valid ratings or not, and we have to trust the security of your site and you personally from not inflating ratings or altering them. In addition if you're American, idiots can sue you for slander if somebody leaves a bad rating they do this on ebay all the time to reverse a negative rating, so now you can't leave negative feedback only positive or neutral.

The only rep I've seen used is OTC, btcjam, your account here, ebay, and amazon. You should just become an escrow agent with OTC rating the more the better as I'm always looking for one at various hours. Then your site people can optionally trust you or the people's rating who they are trading with.

Yes, of course people would have to identify with the bot. Everything would have to be safe in this regard.

The site would never run its own rating system as I don't believe in doing so. I think the rating should be as standardized as possible. Right now, it seems to be Bitcoin OTC.

As far as building trust for me as a person, and in extension to the site, I could definitely act as an escrow agent.

if a web app. id have escrow built into it as standard. so that one person cant then make 100 clones and rate his other 99 names without showing a valid trade has taken place.

i personally do not take the otc rating onboard as my guide of trust.

there is in the UK a service called bitbargain.co.uk (http://bitbargain.co.uk) that has a built in escrow and shows exactly how many trades of actual coins a person has done, how many times the deal has been cancelled and how often the person did not respond.

this to me is a far better and trusted system, not only because of escrow, but because the rating is not just based on someones response. but based on actual trade information