Please help me solve the problem of trust

[Astrohacker]

Besides Ebay being the overlord of their rankings, Ebay also has the US government's laws&regulations. If an Ebay purchase were not a legal contract, it would fall apart. In addition to the myriads of consumer protections on top of Ebay dispute resolution.

I would say the way out is through social networking. With Anon+ or whatever its going to be called, you can not only have an individual identity, but many group identities.

Social networking is a good idea. Howabout this: what we need is a general purpose way to establish relationships between people.

Suppose there is a particular group I am interested in participating with. I create a new identity (public/private key pair) for that group. I then begin interacting with those people. I meet some of them and we become friends. I then wish to establish the following sort of relationships with someone:

* Friend = 0.9 (I like them)
* Trust = 0.9 (I trust them)
* Belief = 0.5 (they're a great person and all, but they believe a lot of wrong stuff)
* Sexual attraction = 0.1 (ugly)

These are just examples, but the idea is that there are many ways you might relate to someone else. Often these relationships can be specified with a number representing the degree or intensity of the relationship, and often they are asymmetric (they are my friend with 0.9, but maybe I am their friend with 0.2). Perhaps trust is just one of the ways people can be related. And thus maybe what we really need is not decentralized eBay, but decentralized eBay+Facebook+OkCupid+etc.

(FWIW, the stuff I have described here could be implemented on Proofnet by just broadcasting whatever relationship you have with someone else.)

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[nighteyes]

Social networking is a good idea. Howabout this: what we need is a general purpose way to establish relationships between people.

That should take care of itself. Talking about mass transactions here, but if a group has too few members it will die. If it has too many it will die. If I want to trust you, then maybe you are in the group of certified public accountants(for example). How do I know your group are actually accountants? Because you are in another group that I trust or am referred to. What I like about this is afterwards,during,etc, I can change my name and you can too. That should make it tougher to investigate.

I also have to have a way to check your credentials in the group....and thats why we need a social networking site.
I only care about business....and you arent going to slap my azz with some point system based on your discrimination. There will be discrimination at the group level, but that may limit that group's opportunities.

[mc_lovin]

One problem with eBay is still hacked/sold/stolen accounts.

One time I "purchased" 100 nintendo DS consoles from a seller with 15,000+ 100% feedback .. was THIS CLOSE to sending them their payments... when I got an email from paypal/ebay security saying STOP, NO, DON'T!!! That account has been hacked!!!

So... you can never really trust anybody, when it comes to buying more than a chocolate bar that is.

If I want to sell you a house and royally fuck you in the process, I only need to "borrow" somebody's good name.

I sold like $600 worth of bitcoins to some german people on eBay and got my transactions all reversed,.. and short of going absolutely nutters, we were extremely thankful that I came up with this video screencapture idea ahead of time!  We called Paypal and bitched at them for awhile, they told me the other peoples' eBay accounts got hacked or something.  And that's the thing that makes me wonder.  Shouldn't eBay have some sort of log of the IP address that accesses each account?  They just label a situation 'oh that was a hacked account' and just protect the 'buyer' a.k.a. scammer. 

Long story short, either the fact that I had a video of me sending the bitcoins to the person in the Paypal proof or they figured out some other reason, Paypal gave me the $600 back!!!

W00T I went out and bought two sweet Radeons that day and was grinning from ear to ear the whole time.   I had the bitcoins as a $25 buy-it-now, so instead of buying them for $13 on an exchange I made these german  people buy them for $25 a pop!

[jgraham]

I just dreamed this up a moment ago while reading this thread, so apologies if its a bit immature.

The problem of trust is that it's trust in a person, while a better system would be to only trust facts. Imagine a semantic network of signed factoids that are readable by both man and machine and signed by the authors of the facts. Factiods ought to be tiny fragments of information, chained together by semantic references:

"1: A contract was agreed between Alice and Mallory" (<Alice>, <Mallory>)
"2: <1> is worth $50" (<Alice>, <Mallory>)
"3: In <1>, Alice will send $50" (<Alice>, <Mallory>)
"4: After <3>, Mallory will send Goods" (<Alice>, <Mallory>)
"5: <3> is complete" (<Alice>, <DHL>)
"6: <4> is complete" (<Mallory>)
"7: <5> is false" (<Mallory>)

A global network of this information could then be mined and sophisticated software can fish out the truth-tellers from the liars, that is of course, if you don't mind having all this information public.

I can't tell if these are machine generated or human generated.  Having an algorithm (even if it's an informal one) based on facts is a lot better than all the crazy self-rating probability schemes that Astrohacker keeps pushing.  Not only that, but you can perform aggregate analysis on facts more easily than on opinions.

Aside: Why does James Surowiecki's terrible scholarship, piss poor logic and inane research methodology resonate so much with people here?  Maybe Dan Ariely has the answer.  

[BladeMcCool]

Imagine a bitcoin-like client software that has 2 types of entries in the block chain. First type is credit extensions from one account to another, and includes the unit of account. The other type is actual transactions. In order to pay someone the system would have to find a path of credit from you to the person you want to pay, just like the ripple system. The software would inspect the existing verified blockchain to determine paths of credit before attempting to initiate payments and payments would cascade/ripple through all required nodes to reach the final destination. The group of p2p transactions that were required to get the payment to the destination will then get included in the next block, assuming the network believes them to be legit. Mining operations in this network which add new blocks to the chain would obviously not have the incentive of new free money like bitcion (presently) has, but could perhaps start off from the get-go with providing transaction fees to successful miners.

So this would be a pure mutual credit system with no actual currency units being created, just the ledger entries for payments and the entries for which accounts extend how much credit of what type to which other accounts. The network would be decentralized and govern itself like bitcoin does and yet operate a lot like how ripplepay is designed.

TLDR: I discuss some of my thoughts in this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAwil1839mU (sorry for the pacing around/spinning ceiling, i can't help myself)

[Coaster]

I've implemented ebay style rating on my forum. I'm planning on implementing a fullout auction and regular classifieds section as well. To further reinforce trust, I will be creating a way for users to verify addresses, and run background checks on those willing to "certify" themselves. I've gone over this thread and have some ideas of ways to implement secure user verifications before trades.

[bitplane]

I can't tell if these are machine generated or human generated.  Having an algorithm (even if it's an informal one) based on facts is a lot better than all the crazy self-rating probability schemes that Astrohacker keeps pushing.  Not only that, but you can perform aggregate analysis on facts more easily than on opinions.

Kind of machine generated, like generated by some software as part of a process followed by humans. There would of course be some registry of registered dialects like how HTML microformats work on the semantic web. Which means you could do some pretty amazing stuff with this data, you'd essentially have a tree of logic that could be explored by any number of crazy algorithms.

[Astrohacker]

Bump. This project seems relevant today.