Decentralized reputation is one of the most sought after prizes in the cypherpunk community: to invent a censorship-resistant protocol to make and par

Decentralized Reputation in OpenBazaar

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2024-09-28 10:30:04

Decentralized reputation is one of the most sought after prizes in the cypherpunk community: to invent a censorship-resistant protocol to make and parse unforgeable trust relationships between pseudonymous identities.

The problem is that trust and reputation are both abstract concepts that aggregate the subjective value judgements of unrelated experiences between people. Fundamentally, trust and reputation are highly contextual, and merely attributing a number or karma points to ascertain the overall trustworthiness of an identity is not very informative or useful.

The reputation of a user is the weighted-average of their transaction ratings. In summary, you cannot make a rating without showing evidence of a transaction over OpenBazaar.

While we earlier explored the web of trust (WoT) model, the system described in this article is not a web of trust. OpenBazaar’s reputation system is similar to eBay and Taobao in that it is transaction-based. Where necessary, we have made some improvements that are described below.

Any reputation system begins with a network of identities. In OpenBazaar, these identities are pseudonymous, which is to say that they are not inherently tied to your real world identity.