Sorry I didn't see this before. a) ebay does NOT work like this. you leave reviews of merchants when you've done business with them, not for pay. b) silk road

Sorry I didn't see this before. a) ebay does NOT work like this. you leave reviews of merchants when you've done business with them, not for pay. b) silk road does not work like this. c) you're now imposing a tax on the market which costs everyone more, disproportionately benefits the wealthiest, and generates confusion. great job. d) how is this not clear? if you add a gold star to someone's review when they have actually purchased from a merchant through your system, that gold star can be evaluated in any number of ways and help weight reviews properly. like, numerically weighting authenticated reviews more heavily. or whatever. there's obviously a downside, which is that unlike yelp, nobody is using their real personality, and there's some benefit to changing ones' personality if one is worried about the legal consequences of ones' actions. but on silk road this doesn't appear to be a significant barrier -- there are enough persistent personalities that it's pretty easy to discern the credible from the questionable. e) you didn't positively answer the original question: has this ever worked? it seems nice based on one single argument (tax on lying) but not based on all the ancillary problems...