VIP Member "goat" abusing trust rating system

[yatsey87]

Maybe you can only leave trust after both parties have agreed to do a deal. It's silly being able to leave trust for anyone anytime. Can you go on ebay and leave everybody negative feedback without even trading with them?

That would be hard to do. Being able to define when someone has done a trade would have to be done manually. Which would require the staff to do a lot of work. That also requires hiring a lot more staff. Even then you have staff which will be involved in a private trade. Which a lot of people will not agree to as a lot like their privacy.

I don't think it would be that hard to implement, nor does it have to involve staff. Just both users have to agree to a trade by checking a box or clicking a link etc before any feedback can be left.

[ajax3592]

Well i did remove it as it is overly hash looking at it a second time. After thinking about it free market and as far as i can tell its not a scam. The rules of the coin, even if unfair seem to have been published.

I really wish we had a nutral option. Only leaving good or bad feedback sucks.

Im willing to adjust feedback and it would have been better to pm me directly. No one is perfect.


Happy holidays.

Thanks for that Goat!

I was shocked to see that neg rep coming from you, since I respect you for the work you do to get the word out for BTC.

You know not everyone was lucky enough to get on early on BTC and LTC.

For many guys out there this coin is the next big hope including me. No other coin in history of cryptos has seen such virality, media coverage plus getting on 4 major exchanges in first 2 weeks of launch.

I was mad-angry on you, I have to admit it.

Good to see your other, side though   you proved everyone wrong

[ajax3592]

Well i did remove it as it is overly hash looking at it a second time. After thinking about it free market and as far as i can tell its not a scam. The rules of the coin, even if unfair seem to have been published.

I really wish we had a nutral option. Only leaving good or bad feedback sucks.

Im willing to adjust feedback and it would have been better to pm me directly. No one is perfect.


Happy holidays.

Thanks for that Goat!

I was shocked to see that neg rep coming from you, since I respect you.

You know not everyone was lucky enough to get on early on BTC and LTC.

For many guys out there this coin is the next big hope including me. No other coin in history of cryptos has seen such virality, media coverage plus getting on 4 major exchanges in first 2 weeks of launch.

I was mad-angry on you, I have to admit it.

Good to see your other, side though  

You know there are 100000000000 doge right?

Not so sure this will end well for you but best of luck.

Yes, I know about that. That's the uniqueness of it. Every fan of it can buy like 2000 of them for $1

Also, the positive thing is, it is attracting loads and loads of attention of kids, teenagers, meme lovers and common-men to crypto which actually is a good news for bitcoin, since it is the king of all crypto anyways - if you can see from a broader perspective.

I hold 2-3 million of them, so even if it gets to 10 cents each, my life is changed, you know.

[yatsey87]

For many guys out there this coin is the next big hope including me. No other coin in history of cryptos has seen such virality, media coverage plus getting on 4 major exchanges in first 2 weeks of launch.

Lol, I think you should chose another coin to back. You'd be better off buying Bitcoin and hoping that the price will skyrocet again in the future.

[whiskers75]

Goat is an immature idiot.  Just ignore his rating.  Everyone knows it is meaningless.

Then why the **** is he in the depth of DefaultTrust?

[pontiacg5]

Goat is an immature idiot.  Just ignore his rating.  Everyone knows it is meaningless.

Then why the **** is he in the depth of DefaultTrust?

Do you really want to know, or are you just being cute?

The trust system is entirely public, you can tell exactly why goat is on the default list. There have even been threads about it.

[tysat]

Goat is an immature idiot.  Just ignore his rating.  Everyone knows it is meaningless.

Then why the **** is he in the depth of DefaultTrust?

Do you really want to know, or are you just being cute?

The trust system is entirely public, you can tell exactly why goat is on the default list. There have even been threads about it.

It's gotta be that one, because whiskers must research things before posting them.  I'm assuming that based off of him getting all worked up over the people who didn't look up anything about avatars.

[freethink2013]

yet another case of the squeaky wheel getting the oil.

well done to the op, it's always worth complaining

[Raize]

Newbies are in DefaultTrust. Those who learn about the system will remove it and put in their own Trust if they choose. I did one deal whereby John K was my escrow and now my Trust looks, expectedly, like DefaultTrust (with Goat in there, no surprise). You'll learn sooner or later that if these folks are marking scam, they have reason to do so, till they don't. In this case a simple PM resolved it, but some people still want to make a mountain of a molehill.

[gmaxwell]

Looks like I'm goat's latest victim.

No big deal, I owed him a negative trust rating in any case— him rating me just reminded me to put it in and removed the disincentive of wanting to avoid attracting his attention.

[theymos]

BadBear removed Goat from his trust list at some point (not sure when), so he's not part of the default trust network anymore.

[SaltySpitoon]

Looks like I'm goat's latest victim.

No big deal, I owed him a negative trust rating in any case— him rating me just reminded me to put it in and removed the disincentive of wanting to avoid attracting his attention.

Why did you owe me a negative trust rating?

Pretty well detailed description in the feedback he left.

[gmaxwell]

It's a little silly:  I go out of my way to avoid engaging trades with sketchy people because I don't want to enable this kind of reputation-extortion. The net result is that there are relatively few ratings of me in the trust system, although practically all of you are running software I wrote (both in Bitcoin, as well as in Firefox and Google Chrome, and probably dozens of other programs), using cryptographic constructs I invented, etc.

Kinda interesting how fast people noticed! Three people have contacted me over it already— (sadly two asked me if they should be "worried" ... uh, people why are you asking ME this!)

[SaltySpitoon]

I dunno, as we all know, the Trust system is completely subjective. The best a person can do is post their information and link their sources, and its up for the reader to detirmine its validity.

For the record, I would trust Goat with my money, and find him to be a very trustworthy person. However I agree with not having you on the default trust list, not that its a vote anyway, tis Badbear's decision. Nothing personal, however some of your feedback ratings have been driven by personal fights you have had with people, and not whether or not they are financially or morally untrustworthy. You have helped to tag scammers and I do appreciate that, but the default trust list isn't about who is trustworthy, its about who can give fair feedback to establish a larger trust network.

[gmaxwell]

Well this may be related to a problem that the Bitcoin-OTC trust system shares:  Trust for trades is not the same thing as trust for trust.  There are people I'd gladly let hold my money, but I'd take their opinions of others with a big grain of salt because they're too trusting, too critical, or are just big on grudges and retaliation.

(I was going to say that trust-trust is a subset of trade-trust, but I can think of at least one forum member who's ratings I'd weigh heavily but that I'd never trade with them)

[DeathAndTaxes]

I dunno, as we all know, the Trust system is completely subjective. The best a person can do is post their information and link their sources, and its up for the reader to detirmine its validity.

For the record, I would trust Goat with my money, and find him to be a very trustworthy person. However I agree with not having you on the default trust list, not that its a vote anyway, tis Badbear's decision. Nothing personal, however some of your feedback ratings have been driven by personal fights you have had with people, and not whether or not they are financially or morally untrustworthy. You have helped to tag scammers and I do appreciate that, but the default trust list isn't about who is trustworthy, its about who can give fair feedback to establish a larger trust network.

gmaxwell unfairly attacked my pool hopping operation with a childporn network that only he knew about (and might have even made up!). One might think pool hopping to be unfair but to attack it with these sort of allegations? Wow! 

Wait how did I miss this event?  Using CP as a weapon?  That is pretty low.   I have no love for pool hopper but they merely exploit the poorly constructed rules of prop pools.  A good thing IMHO as it has driven those pools (mostly) out of existence replaced with fairer distribution systems.

[theymos]

Well this may be related to a problem that the Bitcoin-OTC trust system shares:  Trust for trades is not the same thing as trust for trust.  There are people I'd gladly let hold my money, but I'd take their opinions of others with a big grain of salt because they're too trusting, too critical, or are just big on grudges and retaliation.

(I was going to say that trust-trust is a subset of trade-trust, but I can think of at least one forum member who's ratings I'd weigh heavily but that I'd never trade with them)

The forum's trust system is better than bitcoin-otc in this area because you can give someone a positive rating without trusting their ratings. Your situation is caused by two other defects in the forum's trust system:
- If you trust someone in your trust list and your depth is 1+, you will trust everyone they trust. There's no fancy WoT algorithm here, or even a way to add manual exceptions. So I can't remove Goat from my trust network without also removing DeaDTerra.
- The trust score algorithm isn't very good in general. In this case it sees that you're a new user of the trust system, so it penalizes you in various ways. But this is really not appropriate for you...

[gmaxwell]

gmaxwell unfairly attacked my pool hopping operation with a childporn network that only he knew about (and might have even made up!). One might think pool hopping to be unfair but to attack it with these sort of allegations? Wow!  

I asked the question, thats it. I'd also asked it of you privately without getting an answer.

You didn't disclose what you were doing, I was told by people whos opinions I trust that they believed you were using it to launder money and weren't giving out fresh coins. This was also long after pool hopping was a well known and decreasingly effective thing (or so I believe(d)). I wasn't aware of any plausible lawful scheme that would have returned enough to support 115% PPS. (Jan 2012, I considered pool hooping completely dead months before that)

So  I asked the pointed question in public. Not all miners had considered that they ought to be asking questions like that, or that they might be complicit in some scheme they might not approve of (including pool hopping!). You could have just had a trusted third party certify that your operation was nothing like that and accepted that people asking questions is a cost of doing a sketchy looking business (especially one that operates by ripping people off), instead you behaved in a really concerning way. ...

People not asking and being able to entertain tough questions has been a factor behind any major scam on the forum.  And yet you attack me for trying to look out for others?

Wait how did I miss this event?  Using CP as a weapon?  That is pretty low.   I have no love for pool hopper but they merely exploit the poorly constructed rules of prop pools.  A good thing IMHO as it has driven those pools (mostly) out of existence replaced with fairer distribution systems.

Please read the actual post?  He was not even claiming to be a pool hopper at the time, and I stand by my message. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54467.msg725229#msg725229

I wasn't the only person to be targeted by Goat's "bounties" either:

200 BTC bounty for proof that Maged has pimped a minor or that he has ever been investigated or charged with anything related to children and sex.

[gmaxwell]

And I stand by my response! Shame on you!

You attacked my personally when you failed to understand the significance of pool hopping. Questioning the morality of pool hopping is not the same as linking me and thus you to some child porn trade in your head! You should have apologized years ago for your ignorance and fail!

"Linking"

Here is my complete message:

So what should someone who's been mining for you do when after they use their mined coins to buy Alpaca Socks law enforcement shows up and tells them that their coins were the marked proceeds from a sting operation related to drugs, arms sales, child porn trade, or that they were bitcoins reported previously stolen and that they have a warrants to seize all their computers to look for evidence?

The word on IRC is that these private services which pay >100% PPS in BTC for mining are doing this because they're attempting to get rid of 'dirty' coins which could potentially be traced in exchange for freshly mined coins.  Certainly this is the only thing I've heard that makes any economic sense at all, but if it's true don't the miners have a right to know what role they're playing in this and what risk they're taking?

Have I got it wrong?  Can you help me understand what the business is here?

After you responded with your "bounties" I also replied (in part):

Linking me to Child Porn, Arms and Drugs is a shame upon you. I challenge you to provide evidence to back your accusations! You can not so you are a fool and your reputation will reflect it. It is too bad for you that you are ignorant but that is not my problem.

I did not intend it as accusation, I thought I was adequately clear: I do not know, and I'm looking for answers.  I posed a hypothetical— If you are not in, in fact, engaging in a business which facilitates flimsy bitcoin laundering via mining then I am apologetic for implying otherwise.

Certainly you must agree that when someone sells mining or bitcoin for instant returns _in bitcoin_ of greater than 100% without cautiously evaluating the business they are getting involved with that there is a _risk_ that their funds could be used to launder for these sorts of activities and that the kind of caution I was encouraging is advisable. No?

I also offered to go hide the first part of my message ("if it is a distraction which is preventing you from controlling your emotion long enough to give straight factual answers to these questions which I believe are of great interest to the community here.").

You responded to this message with:

@Maxwell,
I accept your apology as I believe it to be sincere.

But apparently that wasn't true. You instead just decided to wait two years before going after me again.

[gmaxwell]

Hm. I notice that you added that rating immediately after responding to my bet thread highlighting how strongly I believe that current mining hardware prices are overpriced that I'm in fact willing to sell people forward contracts on mining, with funds in escrow: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395243.0

Are you concerned that my views might reduce your ability to offload your own Cointerra units?  If thats whats bothering you, I can add a note that my opinion is related to the April delivery pricing. I wouldn't offer a future like this for January miners.