Verifying the trust of members for new website venture

[OpenYourEyes]

Hi,

I've been working on a project for some time which allows members to trade goods/services with each other, but as with most things it's open to fraudsters ripping off the other user.
I was thinking about using an escrow service, whereby I hold the funds until the goods/service have been delivered, but dealing with payments is a bit beyond my skill level.

So I've been thinking about linking into the web of trust (http://bitcoin-otc.com), so users can see how reputable the member is.
Am I right in thinking that every member at the web of trust has a PGP key, and that I could generate a random message on my website, encrypt it with the users public key, get them to decrypt it with their private and send the plain text message back to me to see if it matches? I would then display a verified logo next to their username.

Cryptography isn't my thing, so is that logic correct and would that work?

Open to other suggestions if you have any?

Thanks.

[1714775456]

1714775456

[1714775456]

1714775456

[1714775456]

1714775456

[1714775456]

1714775456

[Lip]

Cryptography isn't my thing, so is that logic correct and would that work?

Yes it is correct. You can automate this process too it's not a big deal. Just hire a developer.

[OpenYourEyes]

Cryptography isn't my thing, so is that logic correct and would that work?

Yes it is correct. You can automate this process too it's not a big deal. Just hire a developer.

Thanks.

I should be able to do it myself, but from what I've read so far, it all requires interactions over IRC to scrape the data which seems a bit overkill to me, unless I've missed something?

[TheButterZone]

https://github.com/nanotube/supybot-bitcoin-marketmonitor

or email support@localbitcoins.com, as they have OTC ratings integrated.

[OpenYourEyes]

I'll take a look, thanks.

Edit:
I can't seem to work out what that actually does, there's no readme or description, and Google throws up nothing.
But it seems like it's a python plugin for IRC. I'm hoping to keep it relatively simple and not have to incorporate IRC; all I'm basically after is being able to verify that a member on my site is, who they say they are, on BTC-OTC.

[OpenYourEyes]

Took a good few days of work (I'm new to Python), but I managed to create a Python script that interacts with PHP which allows the user to enter their BTC-OTC username, scrapes the BTC-OTC page for their public key ID, downloads it from a key server, encrypts a random piece of text, and verifies if it is correct...Phhhew.

[MPOE-PR]

Here's an OTC explanation.