rewarded by sticking to your nym, and engaging in mutual-profit
transactions."
Actually, the credit card world almost works this way already. In reality, it is very rare that a deadbeat is actually chased all the way to their meatspace bank and income.(Only above a certain writeoff is it worth the effort.) And for "prime" and superprime customers, the potential loss of credit worthiness is in itself enough motivation for paying. (Particularly when it is remembered that bad credit equals higher interest rates equals less money in the pocket.)
And of course, credit worthiness now is just wrt existing credit agencies...they are no different in some ways than one form of "mana" mentioned, and receive reports from the various companies you've interacted with.
The only thing that seems to be harder in a BlackNet environment is the "bootstrapping" part: currently, credit companies can look at your income to see if you'll be able to handle the loan. Is there some "greynet" way proposed to allow one's income stream to be reliably revealed without the source (or sinks!) being seen?
-TD
From: Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Vincent Penquerc'h" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: The burn-off of twenty million useless Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 14:23:10 +0100 (CET)
On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Vincent Penquerc'h wrote:
> But other people might be encline to tag along anyway. A reputation
No, because unless someone signs your stuff of their free will they'd have to extract a secret (ideally) lodged in a tamperproof hardware token, or break the cryptosystem, or coerce the holder of the secret to sign for them -- assuming they can link the nym to the physical persona. If you care for anonymity, that's what traffic remixing is there for.
> system will identify nyms with bad reputation alright, but how will > people *use* this system ? Favorable reputation is nothing per se,
Depends on the scenario. In an online transaction I present my public key, you query the mana associated with it in a database. If I'm a homo novus, my trust level is around zero. If I've been glowingly endorsed by other nyms in good standing (check graph for circlejerk caveat) my reputation is positive. People with really bad mana would tend to camouflage as players with no transaction, so being a new player will always suck. You'll get rewarded by sticking to your nym, and engaging in mutual-profit transactions. My part of the interaction is symmetrical to yours. If we like what we see we make a deal, or go apart.
This can be automated so that you see the mana cloud of a physically present or remote person who're not cloaking it as a size/color-coded tag rendered in a head-up display which you could inquire further. It wouldn't take a lot of work to hack a game server to allow tagged avatars, link game servers in a mesh, and use traffic remixing for avatar control. (Well, it _would_ take a lot of work, unfortunately).
> it only becomes useful by what others make of it, and reputation is > not a single measure. People will have different reactions to the
No, but you'll get a single scalar by integrating over your reference points.
> actions of another person. If someone advocates killing blacks, say, > his reputation will grow to those who have the same opinions, but go
You can look at a distribution of reputation. A single scalar is no enough. You can also change your reference points when computing that scalar.
> down with those who have the opposite opinion. What I'm coming at is > that a reputation system only allows a nym to build up a reputation. > People then react to it.
"only" is good. There's no way currently how you can query the accrued mana of a face in the crowd. Single-round interactions/anonymity encourage defector behaviour. There's a regular food web of defectors and suckers in big cities.
> Your point, I believe, was that the ability to have knowledge of > others' actions would lead to increased cooperation. That goes both
Yes, assuming they care. While people usually evaluate these things at gut level they're not aware of it rationally, so they see little value in participating in such kind of social experiment. Try explaining this to an average Jane on the commute. It's hard.
> ways. Groups of people can cooperate to work against another group > of cooperating people. People assess other's reputations on different
Of course.
> grounds, so people would be attracted to different groups, based on > the subjective assessment they make on the various traits displayed > by a person/nym.
Yes, so what?
> OK, that was my second possibility. I'm just not sure that it could > work so well in a larger scenario. Reputation systems, AFAIK, have
We're going to find out, once wireless and broadband takes off.
> only be used in small scenarios: you observe an agent which does one > thing, then you extrapolate the probability of this agent's actions > based on that knowledge. The observed actions are very narrow, and > I'm unsure it would scale well, and unsure it would prevent people > fucking other people over for power as happens now.
Sure you'll get tribes, and strife. It is compatible with a more benign interaction overall, regardless of which social order you subscribe to.
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