Author Topic: Reputation & username system - alternative to proof of burn  (Read 7960 times)

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Offline Agent86

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Help me get up to speed with what you guys are talking about.  Can you provide more info, or references to where I can get more info about what you mean by "mining", "planned proof of burn", "opposition mining"

It seems to me that any type of reputation systems needs the ability to know, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone thinks of the experience they've had with whatever it is right?  In other words, for a generic reputation system you need to have a concise description of the experience large numbers of people have had with it, and a measure of how many people have had that experience vs competing camps/descriptions.  Or, the kind of stuff you can do at canonizer.com?

I'm using "mining" figuratively, it's just a way of using "coin-days" to demonstrate commitment to something.  Coin-days are a scarce resource that you can use rather than "proof of burn" where the scarce resource is the stake/coins themselves.  "opposition mining" is just using the same method to indicate commitment in opposition to something (a username).  Proof of burn is basically indicating that you have invested in your username by burning money (shares), I think people will generally be reluctant to do this.

Offline Brent.Allsop

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Help me get up to speed with what you guys are talking about.  Can you provide more info, or references to where I can get more info about what you mean by "mining", "planned proof of burn", "opposition mining"

It seems to me that any type of reputation systems needs the ability to know, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone thinks of the experience they've had with whatever it is right?  In other words, for a generic reputation system you need to have a concise description of the experience large numbers of people have had with it, and a measure of how many people have had that experience vs competing camps/descriptions.  Or, the kind of stuff you can do at canonizer.com?


Offline Agent86

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Got it.

However I still don't like the idea that someone could revoke your name at any cost.
It could go away due to inactivity or unpaid fees but not due to someone with larger stake mining/minting against you.

I disagree, I think this allows the shareholders as a whole to decide that this particular name is a spoof or inappropriate and revoke it before it ever gets a chance to be used.  It also allows the shareholders to decide that the person squatting "toast" can't do that and toast can get his name back.  Generally one other person with a little more stake than you can't afford to waste the effort trying to fight you about your username, it's mostly a community driven thing.

Offline emski

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Got it.

However I still don't like the idea that someone could revoke your name at any cost.
It could go away due to inactivity or unpaid fees but not due to someone with larger stake mining/minting against you.

Offline Agent86

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I generally like your idea! I think it is better than burning.

However there are some things about it I find as problematic:

I don't like the idea of automatically revoking account name if its trust is negative.
How will you prove it is not registered again by the same person?

Also I do not like the robohash avatars - here is my proposal about this: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9109.0 .

Names are not automatically revoked if trust is negative.  Trust has no bearing on revocation; only devotion & lifespan impact revocation.  Lifespan must go to zero for a name to be revoked.

I'll give an example:
If you have a username that you have had for 2 years and you have 10 shares that you have been mining the username with over that timeā€¦.  People can distrust you all they want and your trust is negative but it doesn't otherwise impact your name.  If someone with the same amount of stake as you (10 shares) starts opposition mining your username and you continue to also mine your username then your devotion would no longer increase (because the mining would even out) but you would never lose your user name.  If someone with twice the stake as you (20 shares) starts "neg-mining" your user name than your devotion score would start to decline.  It would take 2 years of this before your devotion score declined to zero and became negative.  At that date your lifespan would be 4 years (for 4 years you have owned the user name with a positive devotion score).  It would take 4 more years with your devotion score staying negative and your lifespan now declining before your lifespan would finally reach zero and your username is revoked.  So if you had your name for 2 years it took someone with twice the stake 6 years to revoke it from you (for the last 4 years your devotion was negative so probably no one trusts you but you haven't lost your name.)  Does that make sense?

Offline emski

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I generally like your idea! I think it is better than burning.

However there are some things about it I find as problematic:

I don't like the idea of automatically revoking account name if its trust is negative.
How will you prove it is not registered again by the same person?

Also I do not like the robohash avatars - here is my proposal about this: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9109.0 .

Offline Agent86

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I'm not a big fan of using proof of burn for reputation as planned.  I want to propose an alternative.  I think although these ideas are more complex they are more useful.

Every username would have a birthday and three reputation metrics or scores:
   1) Trust
   2) Devotion
   3) Lifespan
   
Everything builds off the devotion metric which is accomplished by mining your user name via coin-day mining "CDM".  Essentially you can point a balance to a user name to increase (or decrease) it's devotion score proportional to the coin days of the stake directed toward the user name.  This metric is scarce because a given balance cannot mine multiple usernames at the same time.  Multiple balances can however mine a single username concurrently.

The process starts when someone pays a reasonable fee to register a username.  This initiates a 30 day "auction" that is decided by competitive coin-day mining.  If no one else competes for the username or mines against it, than the person who registered it/mined it the most gets it after 30days.  This date is the "birthday" of the user name.

The devotion score for a user name is generally given by the formula: supportive_CDM - opposing_CDM = devotion.

Any username may choose to trust, not trust, or remain neutral toward another username.  The user name's total trust score is determined by the sum of the devotion scores of all usernames who trust it minus the sum of the devotion scores of all usernames who distrust it.

The lifespan for most accounts will be equivalent to the age of the account since the birthdate and goes up with time.  However if a username's total devotion score is brought negative by opposing CDM, the lifespan instead decreases with time for as long as the devotion score remains negative.  If a username's lifespan goes to zero, the user "dies" (username is revoked and it may be re-registered by someone else.)

The robo-hash images can hash both the username and the birthdate so that if a username ever changes hands the robo-hash image also changes.

Most names will have positive metrics for all three and the more positive the better. 

If there is a user you don't trust you can simply distrust the user and encourage others to do the same.  Any name with a negative trust score should typically not be trusted.

If the user is particularly offensive or the username is an attempt to spoof, you can opposition mine the name to destroy it's devotion score and eventually kill it/get it revoked. Any name with a negative devotion score is a huge red flag.  This account is quite likely a spoof/fake name and is on the road to revocation unless they can mine it to bring it positive.  There would be BIG warnings before sending any funds to a username with negative devotion.

The longer you have maintained your username in good standing the longer your lifespan and the longer time you have to react if someone starts opposition mining your username.

During the initial auction if there is more opposing CDM than the highest user competing to own the name then the name is never created.  So if someone tries to register an offensive name we can neg-mine it and it is killed in utero.

If you want to take a real close look at a username you can see specifically who trusts them, who doesn't, how recently was their devotion mined etc.

There is a natural opposition between trust & reputation and anonymity/privacy.  My feeling is that anonymity has generally been overemphasized at the expense of more important things.