To BtcJam: Please fix your system.

[MPOE-PR]

1st Problem: your OTC-WOT imports are broken on multiple levels. For one, how did this user get 14 positive 2 negative? If indeed he imported this OTC ratings twice this is problematic because

1.a. His OTC rating is really 7 : 0.
1.b. If he imported it a hundred thousand times he'd have close to a million positive?

This implementation (1.a particularly) shows a complete misrepresentation of how OTC-WOT works, what it is intended to do and so forth. You are not to take simple point sums as an indication of trust. Read this post and fundamentally revisit the way you handle OTC-WOT imports. This is not something that allows a quick fix. You will have to redesign that part.

2nd Problem: your on-site ratings seem to have created an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of OTC-WOT. This is not how programming works. Yes, your users should be able to rate other users, nobody is disputing that, however! the way you went about implementing that is horrible.

3rd Problem: To view user ratings you currently require logging in. Most people of any import in BTC will never make an account, with you or anyone else. Obviously you may think this is a marketing decision entirely yours to make, but if you imagine you can push users into making accounts because your service arbitrarily imposes that burden you are in for a very, very rude awakening. BTC people aren't the sort to be pushed around thus, this isn't the Facebook crowd you're coding for.

Don't get me wrong, the general idea of BtcJam is good, useful and all that. The implementation needs to be fixed.

[makomk]

This implementation (1.a particularly) shows a complete misrepresentation of how OTC-WOT works, what it is intended to do and so forth. You are not to take simple point sums as an indication of trust. Read this post and fundamentally revisit the way you handle OTC-WOT imports. This is not something that allows a quick fix. You will have to redesign that part.

Well, in theory you're not meant to. In practice using the WoT as a WoT may not actually be a great idea. Did you know that despite scamming most of the Bitcoin community for vast sums and having the most negative total trust of anyone in the WoT, pirateat40 still has positive trust scores if you start from widely-trusted members of the community? It turns out that, because he started off trading in the WoT and because his shills and supporters were widely trusted, the people who gave positive ratings to one of Bitcoin's biggest scammers are considered more trustworthy than the people scammed by him, and his victims' scores are basically ignored.

[Stephen Gornick]

pirateat40 still has positive trust scores if you start from widely-trusted members of the community? It turns out that, because he started off trading in the WoT and because his shills and supporters were widely trusted, the people who gave positive ratings to one of Bitcoin's biggest scammers are considered more trustworthy than the people scammed by him, and his victims' scores are basically ignored.

You are not using WoT correctly then.  Firstly, as MPOE-PR states:

You are not to take simple point sums as an indication of trust

Additionally, you should look at the dates and types of transactions in the WoT trust history.

When pirate was buying bitcoins and paying with PayPal, he wasn't scamming those sellers.  Therefore if you were looking to the WoT to determine if trading your coins to pirate where he would pay using PayPal, then you would find that others were able to do so without any problem.  You would probably be safe in completing a similar trade and also end up with positive results.

Nowhere from the WoT should anyone have gotten the impression that participation in a high yield investment program (HYIP, ... or more commonly known as a "Ponzi") would be a good idea.

The WoT doesn't require that people review their previous ratings.   Therefore, more recent ratings should be given a greater weight than older ratings.  As pirate's dealings raised more and more questions, there were more recent ratings that should have given anyone reason to pause.

The WoT isn't a credit ratings service.  It is instead a good method to identify those whose trading history means you should not do a trade with.  If you are looking to trade your $50 Dwolla for 5 BTC, then if someone has a history going back six months, has done a dozen trades using Dwolla, and not a single negative mark -- well, you have no reason to distrust the person and can likely conclude that your $50 trade will complete just fine.

It doesn't tell you if that person would be a good party to lend money to.

If you used it for that purpose, you are doing it wrong.

[repentance]

I have to agree with the point about needing to make an account in order to view user profiles.  It's up to you to convince us that you have users with projects worth investing in.  We'll join in order to lend to them if you can do that.  There are some pretty shitty listings on there anyway from what I can see and that makes me even less inclined to join to find out more information about the few that just might be worth considering. 

You need to make the site as lender friendly as possible, especially given that you're essentially asking people to trust your ability to sort things out if the borrower defaults.  Making lenders join in order to obtain more information about those seeking funds is just creating a reason for them to look elsewhere for borrowers. 

[MPOE-PR]

This implementation (1.a particularly) shows a complete misrepresentation of how OTC-WOT works, what it is intended to do and so forth. You are not to take simple point sums as an indication of trust. Read this post and fundamentally revisit the way you handle OTC-WOT imports. This is not something that allows a quick fix. You will have to redesign that part.

Well, in theory you're not meant to. In practice using the WoT as a WoT may not actually be a great idea. Did you know that despite scamming most of the Bitcoin community for vast sums and having the most negative total trust of anyone in the WoT, pirateat40 still has positive trust scores if you start from widely-trusted members of the community? It turns out that, because he started off trading in the WoT and because his shills and supporters were widely trusted, the people who gave positive ratings to one of Bitcoin's biggest scammers are considered more trustworthy than the people scammed by him, and his victims' scores are basically ignored.

Did you know you completely ignored the link provided in the post you're responding to, which shows in jarring light because the example you propose is used as a case study there?

[makomk]

Did you know you completely ignored the link provided in the post you're responding to, which shows in jarring light because the example you propose is used as a case study there?

WoT-like trust scores don't even protect you when making exactly the same kind and value of non-ponzi-like trades that the positive ratings were based on though. Silk Road in particular apparently has a problem with so-called "selective scammers" - sellers who deal honestly with high-trust individuals that can affect their reputation whilst outright ripping off newbies with no community trust. There is no trust-based system that can fix this problem, whether it's points-based WoT or informal community decisions. The only people who can put any trust in someone based on their score or ratings or reputation at all are people who also have the ability to influence it.

[Tulkas]

1st Problem: your OTC-WOT imports are broken on multiple levels. For one, how did this user get 14 positive 2 negative? If indeed he imported this OTC ratings twice this is problematic because

1.a. His OTC rating is really 7 : 0.
1.b. If he imported it a hundred thousand times he'd have close to a million positive?

This implementation (1.a particularly) shows a complete misrepresentation of how OTC-WOT works, what it is intended to do and so forth. You are not to take simple point sums as an indication of trust. Read this post and fundamentally revisit the way you handle OTC-WOT imports. This is not something that allows a quick fix. You will have to redesign that part.

1.a was a bug.
We check the uniqueness of the imported key, of course, but in that particular case the user entered the short keyid and the long keyid, duplicating the entries.
 
Yes, we know that the Web of Trust is not an indication of trust, that's why we don't even use that name in the site. We think reputation is a better word for it.

2nd Problem: your on-site ratings seem to have created an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of OTC-WOT. This is not how programming works. Yes, your users should be able to rate other users, nobody is disputing that, however! the way you went about implementing that is horrible.

Our reputation systems allows users to rate each other, with a -10 to +10 rating range. The user can also add a comment to his/her rating.

The only difference to OTC-WOT is that we show a percentage of positive ratings along with the score, just like ebay does, i don't see what is so terrible about that. If you have some constructive advice I will be more than glad to hear.

3rd Problem: To view user ratings you currently require logging in. Most people of any import in BTC will never make an account, with you or anyone else. Obviously you may think this is a marketing decision entirely yours to make, but if you imagine you can push users into making accounts because your service arbitrarily imposes that burden you are in for a very, very rude awakening. BTC people aren't the sort to be pushed around thus, this isn't the Facebook crowd you're coding for.

Don't get me wrong, the general idea of BtcJam is good, useful and all that. The implementation needs to be fixed.

We post most of the relevant info on the public listings page, the login requirement was made with privacy in mind, I will post this feature request to vote on our feedback widget so our users can vote.

[Tulkas]

Additionally, you should look at the dates and types of transactions in the WoT trust history.

You have made a good point, but then we cannot call it "bitcoin-otc" rating import anymore because we will be changing the way points are computed, right?

The WoT isn't a credit ratings service.  It is instead a good method to identify those whose trading history means you should not do a trade with.  If you are looking to trade your $50 Dwolla for 5 BTC, then if someone has a history going back six months, has done a dozen trades using Dwolla, and not a single negative mark -- well, you have no reason to distrust the person and can likely conclude that your $50 trade will complete just fine.

It doesn't tell you if that person would be a good party to lend money to.

If you used it for that purpose, you are doing it wrong.

Yes, we know that, and we don't use it that way, there is a separate credit rating attributed to the user that takes into account real credit score evaluation, identity verification, repaying behavior, open credit lines, etc.

The OTC-WOT is shown as "user reputation", it is there for the exact same use case you described, to allow users know the past trading/lending history of the user, nothing more.

[Tulkas]

I have to agree with the point about needing to make an account in order to view user profiles.  It's up to you to convince us that you have users with projects worth investing in.  We'll join in order to lend to them if you can do that.  There are some pretty shitty listings on there anyway from what I can see and that makes me even less inclined to join to find out more information about the few that just might be worth considering. 

You need to make the site as lender friendly as possible, especially given that you're essentially asking people to trust your ability to sort things out if the borrower defaults.  Making lenders join in order to obtain more information about those seeking funds is just creating a reason for them to look elsewhere for borrowers. 

Thanks for the feedback.

We do not moderate the listings!

Our initial intention was to let users speak for themselves and let the reputation system work along with the identity/credit/address/phone verification process. This alone, we think, is a major improvement over the anonymous WOT system.

We have several good payers and the majority of loans are being paid on time, but we even allow anonymous users to request loans, maybe this is too idealistic from our side, but we want to give the maximum level of freedom to our users.

The idea is to give all information we can to lenders and provide the identity verification infrastructure but the ultimate decision is up to the investor.