4 ms·

> There's no way cryptography and peer-to-peer consensus protocols will provide verification for goods and services. Why wouldn't reputation help with this pro

> There's no way cryptography and peer-to-peer consensus protocols will provide verification for goods and services. Why wouldn't reputation help with this problem? users will have to start small to develop their reputation, but doing so will allow users more trust. There are ways of doing things that don't involve guns - and that's ultimately what government relies on.

Lambdanaut 13y ago
It's the same concept as a credit score, really.
pjc50 13y ago
Trust is always gameable; Madoff got billions by getting people to trust him. (I thought libertarians were in favour of gun-based dispute resolution systems?)
- MarkPNeyer 13y ago
  Every social system is gameable. Trust based upon reputation is far far simpler than government. One thing bitcoin gives the world is the blockchain; there has never been a historical record that is free to access and to add records to, but impossible to modify. That's HUGE. As for libertarians, you clearly don't understand at all. They want to avoid systems of conflict resolution that depend on violence; that's their whole point. Their obsession with trade, contracts and money arise from their view that those are voluntary ways of interacting.
  - sz4kerto 13y ago
    It's not free to add to. It's computationally extremely expensive, that's why miners are compensated.
    - MarkPNeyer 13y ago
      proofofexistence.com is free to use; that's what i meant.
    - Aqueous 13y ago
      Mining is wasteful but in principle proof of work can be largely replaced by proof of stake, dramatically lowering the energy costs.
  - meowface 13y ago
    Reputation-based trust is a great starting point, but one big incentive for merchants/service providers to not scam customers is the threat of lawsuits and prosecution by the government. If a provider can get away with scamming people, without any sort of true repercussions other than a reputation hit, then the rate of "long cons" will probably increase by a lot. From an anecdotal perspective, I used to be involved in gray markets like trading and selling MMO accounts. Generally there would be no repercussion for scamming the other party; the MMO companies forbade the trade, payment providers don't care, and the government doesn't really recognize it as a real transaction. These markets had a deeply ingrained reputation system tied to the message board, but escrow was also very common. Many people would offer their services as middlemen to provide escrow for trades, but over time there became an alarmingly high number of middlemen who would properly handle dozens or even hundreds of trades, then scam both parties simultaneously once they came across the biggest transaction of their life. No repercussions came to them; they just stopped being middlemen and had fun with their treasure. These kinds of examples show that reputation, cryptographic authentication, proof of payment, payment irrevokability, and plain man-in-the-middle escrow combined are still not enough to actually prevent fraud in many cases. There are some examples of 2-man escrow systems out there using Bitcoin, though, which is far more promising. That prevents any one party from scamming the other 2. The remaining problem, which I imagine will never be solved, is the vendor proving or the buyer disproving that the vendor gave the goods or services that were asked for.
    - tlrobinson 13y ago
      "Many people would offer their services as middlemen to provide escrow for trades, but over time there became an alarmingly high number of middlemen who would properly handle dozens or even hundreds of trades, then scam both parties simultaneously once they came across the biggest transaction of their life." This is impossible with a Bitcoin escrow contracts since 2 of the 3 parties need to agree to unlock the funds, and where to send them. And this is a perfect example of something that was literally not possible before Bitcoin (well, I suppose it could be done with some elaborate scheme with physical vaults and keys, but certainly not on the internet)
      - 13y ago
- tsax 13y ago
  Considering that SEC officials sat on their ass likely watching porn on the job while receiving multiple substantial complaints about Madoff indicates your naive asymmetric idealization involved in hypothetical market failure scenarios while excusing very real actual regulatory failures. There is no utopia. Deal with it.
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  It's interesting you used Madoff as an example, because it's precisely the type of situation gmaxwell's proof-of-reserves scheme is designed to solve.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Lambdanaut 13y ago

It's the same concept as a credit score, really.

pjc50 13y ago

Trust is always gameable; Madoff got billions by getting people to trust him. (I thought libertarians were in favour of gun-based dispute resolution systems?)

MarkPNeyer 13y ago
Every social system is gameable. Trust based upon reputation is far far simpler than government. One thing bitcoin gives the world is the blockchain; there has never been a historical record that is free to access and to add records to, but impossible to modify. That's HUGE. As for libertarians, you clearly don't understand at all. They want to avoid systems of conflict resolution that depend on violence; that's their whole point. Their obsession with trade, contracts and money arise from their view that those are voluntary ways of interacting.
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  It's not free to add to. It's computationally extremely expensive, that's why miners are compensated.
  - MarkPNeyer 13y ago
    proofofexistence.com is free to use; that's what i meant.
  - Aqueous 13y ago
    Mining is wasteful but in principle proof of work can be largely replaced by proof of stake, dramatically lowering the energy costs.
- meowface 13y ago
  Reputation-based trust is a great starting point, but one big incentive for merchants/service providers to not scam customers is the threat of lawsuits and prosecution by the government. If a provider can get away with scamming people, without any sort of true repercussions other than a reputation hit, then the rate of "long cons" will probably increase by a lot. From an anecdotal perspective, I used to be involved in gray markets like trading and selling MMO accounts. Generally there would be no repercussion for scamming the other party; the MMO companies forbade the trade, payment providers don't care, and the government doesn't really recognize it as a real transaction. These markets had a deeply ingrained reputation system tied to the message board, but escrow was also very common. Many people would offer their services as middlemen to provide escrow for trades, but over time there became an alarmingly high number of middlemen who would properly handle dozens or even hundreds of trades, then scam both parties simultaneously once they came across the biggest transaction of their life. No repercussions came to them; they just stopped being middlemen and had fun with their treasure. These kinds of examples show that reputation, cryptographic authentication, proof of payment, payment irrevokability, and plain man-in-the-middle escrow combined are still not enough to actually prevent fraud in many cases. There are some examples of 2-man escrow systems out there using Bitcoin, though, which is far more promising. That prevents any one party from scamming the other 2. The remaining problem, which I imagine will never be solved, is the vendor proving or the buyer disproving that the vendor gave the goods or services that were asked for.
  - tlrobinson 13y ago
    "Many people would offer their services as middlemen to provide escrow for trades, but over time there became an alarmingly high number of middlemen who would properly handle dozens or even hundreds of trades, then scam both parties simultaneously once they came across the biggest transaction of their life." This is impossible with a Bitcoin escrow contracts since 2 of the 3 parties need to agree to unlock the funds, and where to send them. And this is a perfect example of something that was literally not possible before Bitcoin (well, I suppose it could be done with some elaborate scheme with physical vaults and keys, but certainly not on the internet)
    - 13y ago
tsax 13y ago
Considering that SEC officials sat on their ass likely watching porn on the job while receiving multiple substantial complaints about Madoff indicates your naive asymmetric idealization involved in hypothetical market failure scenarios while excusing very real actual regulatory failures. There is no utopia. Deal with it.
tlrobinson 13y ago
It's interesting you used Madoff as an example, because it's precisely the type of situation gmaxwell's proof-of-reserves scheme is designed to solve.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]