Re: [circle] p2p auctions

[thomasV]

address@hidden wrote:

> Web of trust is almost ideally suited to reputation management.  Circle
> implements it for gossip, but I'd love to be able to manage multiple trust
> levels for each peer.  Say I trust quag's gossip x%, his file shares not
> to be mislabeled y%, his auctions to be valid z%, his payment for
> purchases some other amount, maybe even his musical taste.... 

One issue is that buyers typically buy only
one or two items from a given seller, while
each buyer interacts with lots of different sellers.
So the question is, where do we store the
feedback comments concerning one seller,
given that this feedback comes from many
different buyers?

- we cannot store these comments on the
seller's client because we cannot trust him.

- it would make sense to store them on the
buyers clients, but that is complicated, because:
1. it creates some traffic.
2. it assumes that the clients are online and
publish their comments at the time you want
to read them. this is unlikely...

- maybe a solution would be to publish these
comments in the cache of circle, so that they
remain available after the person who wrote
them goes offline. But even in that case, it
remains easy to write fake comments...

in ebay, fake comments are much less of a problem,
because in order to write yourself a fake comment
you need to create an identity, perform a transaction,
and pay the ebay fee for that transaction.
therefore comments have a cost.

so, maybe we need a central authority that does this job...

> Maybe we need an API for attaching new protocols to the DHT,
> something that lets the author of the subprotocol define what they
> are publishing, what data is transferred, what trust metrics will
> be used etc.  Some trust metrics would be shared between protocols,
> and others would not.  You could even use trust to create channels
> with varying levels of privacy, or configure what shared files are
> shown to what users, etc.  Eventually this could be used to keep
> censorship out of circle. (Pssst: Don't trust the Men in
> Black!!  They hate aliens and peaceful coders!) Then again its been so
> long since I've been active, maybe we already such things.
>