Author Topic: Reputation & username system - alternative to proof of burn  (Read 7959 times)

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Offline bitder

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  I think the current "chicken and egg" situation where you need to ask someone to register you is a little ridiculous.

Again check the first proposal here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9075.0

It should allow us to get rid of "Post here if you want 1 BTSX" threads.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just allow transfers to any address as well as TITAN transfers to a name?
A problem with only supporting TITAN is that the exchanges have a record of all fund transfers by name (which arguably is less private than just allowing transfers to any address where the exchanges can't definitively associate the participant on the other side of the transaction).
i.e. the exchange knows you transferred 50K BTSX to account Fred instead of just knowing that you transferred 50K BTSX to some address that may or may not be yours.
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Offline luckybit

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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.

It might be better if people can't see who trusts who but instead just have a point and badge system. Connections between people is not necessary to track for this purpose.
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Offline gamey

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Waiting 30 days to get your username is horrible for adoption.

I'm thinking of the username more as a luxury.  I would want it so it is not necessary to get started and use the system.  I think the current "chicken and egg" situation where you need to ask someone to register you is a little ridiculous.

I want to dislike the idea of large stakes buying trust systems, but I can't think up a good argument against it at the moment.  I would need examples etc.  Can this be abused to shake people down?  I get a large stake behind me, we find legitimate business and bad rep them unless they pay up.  What prevents this ?
I don't think these concerns have merit.  As soon as you try to blackmail someone that person will distrust you and makes the situation publically known.  Then if you are trying to go around doing this to everyone, they all distrust you and you seem to distrust everyone and people talk so it's not hard to figure out what's going on here.

I agree having to register first is ridiculous, but that is an issue with the exchanges forcing that requirement.  I suppose that for BTSX waiting 30 days is somewhat reasonable, where for KeyID DAC it would be a killer.  It just seems strange to me.  There will be a certain subset of guys who are actually involved in this process.  The naming thing just isn't important enough to justify this auction type system and all the weird market that'll occur in the background.  It just makes BTSX all that more complicated in a way that doesn't really bring enough value.  The names are meant to aid ease of use, we're going backwards trying to create yet another market within the system.

The person blackmailing doesn't have to be known and can move their stake around at will.  I would need to study the issue more if this isn't true.

This also doesn't solve spoof scammers.  If I understand correctly, those spoof bter type accounts that get random deposits can be negative mined at which point they show up on the market again.  What prevents a scammer from doing the whole thing again?  It is up to bter to try and vote these guys down  ?  I am not sure there is a big incentive from others.
Gamey, you are not understanding these issues at all.

I does solve spoof scammers... The user names never even become active because when someone tries to register them (must pay for this) they have no chance to out-mine the community/exchanges.  Mining has an opportunity cost in that they can't build a reputation on a name they can actually keep and their misbehavior is not rewarded...  Blackmailers can't "hide"; all these transactions are publically auditable... in the worst case for bad actors they risk having their staked forked/removed from the network.

Reputation is not some "needless distraction."  It is important, useful, and a problem that a lot of people have been trying to solve.

There are going to be multiple spoof scam names for any name.  Some spoof addresses have more value others won't.  Seems to me this is another way to allow a person with a large stake to remove the name of a smaller person.  These assumptions that the community will behave in a certain way need to be examined.  Much like approval voting is great, but realistically the average stake holder can't and will not be aware enough of 101 delegates.

As far as blackmailers, I don't see why people won't be able to mix up who and where they come from.  Nor do I think this would ever become severe enough for anyone to be forked out.

Blackmailers can hide.  Do you think you'd know who a blackmailer is ?  Why would you assume this?  To me it seems quite easy to hide your id in these situations. What is going to keep them from mixing their coins in at some point.  You would seriously consider forking the network over this as a solution ? 

And yes I think making another market for names inside bitshares x will make the product needlessly complicated and convoluted.  Lets see..  we had a system meant to make the whole thing easier to use.  It has the spoof problem albeit minor.  Dan proposes an ok system.  Then you come along and want there to be a 30 day wait to obtain the name while others bid on it in yet another market embedded inside bitsharesx.  How do these 2 objectives fit together ?  People aren't going to want to screw with all that.  Yes it is needless.  We need a somewhat simpler solution and no account name revocation by large stakes.
« Last Edit: September 20, 2014, 01:38:36 am by gamey »
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Offline Brent.Allsop

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In my opinion it is just stupid to think Alibaba has anything to do with the crash in Total Crypto Currency Market Cap.

In my opinion it is all about uncertainty,  everyone knows capital flees uncertainty.  The more 2.0 currencies there are, the more people are becoming aware of the weakness in Bitcoin.

My prediction is that in 2015, a new currency will overtake Bitcoin with the leading market cap, and that Bitcoin will crash very fast when this happens.  It will only take a few months for the entire industry to switch to the new leader, sending it to the moon, and continuing the "Canonized Law of the Crypto Currency"  http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/154/2

If more experts get involved in these kinds of amplification of the wisdom of the crowd surveys, they become exponentially more intelligent.  And you can see how well people are at predicting by checking their history of what camp they were in.  I know I'm bragging, but you can see from my history that I've been in the right on the money camp, way before anyone else, many times already.  It'd be very cool if anyone could beet me in their predictions, and such would help amplify everyones knowledge about the revolution that is about to happen, so everyone can be expecting, and profiting from it, instead of getting turned off, and loosing money from it.








Offline Agent86

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First, I want to say that I don't think we need trust/reputation and even account names on every DAC. In my view we should keep the account names and the trust/reputation of an account on a single DAC: BitShares DNS. Other DACs should simply refer to the DNS DAC when determining the Account Keys and reputation of an account from a human-readable account name, just like they would have to refer to the DNS DAC to get the IP address and public keys of a .p2p domain.

Okay, that still leaves some trust/reputation mechanisms needed for KeyID accounts. Agent86, I think your proposal is pretty decent, but I have some concerns. First, I don't like that someone needs to wait 30 days to get a novel account name set up. That is putting up unnecessary barriers for new users in my opinion. And, there is already a great name system with a proper auction for names that we want proper discovery on: the .p2p domains. As for KeyID names, I think if someone picks a new account name and people don't think it should be registered, it will be killed by negative devotion fairly quickly anyway (since lifetime would be very small by the time people realize the name was registered). If an account name has been killed, then we can require waiting 30 days before it can be re-registered. During that time you can have people competing with the devotion mining as in your proposal.

By the way, I want to make the quick side remark that I am not very bothered by the idea of account names dying and being reclaimed. Your robohash patch is clever, but I don't even think that is necessary. I personally never liked the robohash idea to begin with (it looks too unprofessional). I would rather rely on adding accounts I communicate with or send money to in my favorites and use that to warn me against typos. And if an account died and was re-registered, the client could automatically warn me when that happens to any of the accounts in my favorites. In the case of adding new contacts to favorites or sending money to a contact not in my favorites, since this is an unusual event, I think relying on registration date and trust level should be enough to prevent mistakes (if the client GUI is designed properly that is). Also with our own version of BIP 70, payments to merchants would be secured with their .p2p name not their KeyID name.

The second concern I have is regarding privacy. While people can use their coin-age to add or subtract devotion of any user. I bet that it is going to be far more likely that any positive devotion is going to be to their own accounts. This links the balances of the user together to their account. And even that wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't for the fact that you really should use your coin-age to boost your devotion to protect your account from the trolls. I wonder if there can be a technical solution to this using linkable ring signatures (or whatever BitShares Vote is using). You could use signatures to prove ownership of balances that have already been transferred but not yet claimed as coin-age. The sum of the claimed coin-age is rounded down to the nearest N*c coin-age (where N is an integer and c is some fixed coin-age constant). This entitles the recipient to N coin-age votes. Then using linkable ring signatures, the user can disassociate the N coin-age votes from the original signatures granting access to the coin-age votes, and use each of the disassociated coin-age votes to either add to or subtract from any account's devotion. A lot of complication for the sake of privacy. Not sure if it is worth it.
Thanks for taking the time to understand the proposal and thanks for the feedback  :)  I think the comments are reasonable.  I think there is time to iron things out.

Offline arhag

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First, I want to say that I don't think we need trust/reputation and even account names on every DAC. In my view we should keep the account names and the trust/reputation of an account on a single DAC: BitShares DNS. Other DACs should simply refer to the DNS DAC when determining the Account Keys and reputation of an account from a human-readable account name, just like they would have to refer to the DNS DAC to get the IP address and public keys of a .p2p domain.

Okay, that still leaves some trust/reputation mechanisms needed for KeyID accounts. Agent86, I think your proposal is pretty decent, but I have some concerns. First, I don't like that someone needs to wait 30 days to get a novel account name set up. That is putting up unnecessary barriers for new users in my opinion. And, there is already a great name system with a proper auction for names that we want proper discovery on: the .p2p domains. As for KeyID names, I think if someone picks a new account name and people don't think it should be registered, it will be killed by negative devotion fairly quickly anyway (since lifetime would be very small by the time people realize the name was registered). If an account name has been killed, then we can require waiting 30 days before it can be re-registered. During that time you can have people competing with the devotion mining as in your proposal.

By the way, I want to make the quick side remark that I am not very bothered by the idea of account names dying and being reclaimed. Your robohash patch is clever, but I don't even think that is necessary. I personally never liked the robohash idea to begin with (it looks too unprofessional). I would rather rely on adding accounts I communicate with or send money to in my favorites and use that to warn me against typos. And if an account died and was re-registered, the client could automatically warn me when that happens to any of the accounts in my favorites. In the case of adding new contacts to favorites or sending money to a contact not in my favorites, since this is an unusual event, I think relying on registration date and trust level should be enough to prevent mistakes (if the client GUI is designed properly that is). Also with our own version of BIP 70, payments to merchants would be secured with their .p2p name not their KeyID name.

The second concern I have is regarding privacy. While people can use their coin-age to add or subtract devotion of any user. I bet that it is going to be far more likely that any positive devotion is going to be to their own accounts. This links the balances of the user together to their account. And even that wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't for the fact that you really should use your coin-age to boost your devotion to protect your account from the trolls. I wonder if there can be a technical solution to this using linkable ring signatures (or whatever BitShares Vote is using). You could use signatures to prove ownership of balances that have already been transferred but not yet claimed as coin-age. The sum of the claimed coin-age is rounded down to the nearest N*c coin-age (where N is an integer and c is some fixed coin-age constant). This entitles the recipient to N coin-age votes. Then using linkable ring signatures, the user can disassociate the N coin-age votes from the original signatures granting access to the coin-age votes, and use each of the disassociated coin-age votes to either add to or subtract from any account's devotion. A lot of complication for the sake of privacy. Not sure if it is worth it.



Offline Agent86

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Waiting 30 days to get your username is horrible for adoption.

I'm thinking of the username more as a luxury.  I would want it so it is not necessary to get started and use the system.  I think the current "chicken and egg" situation where you need to ask someone to register you is a little ridiculous.

I want to dislike the idea of large stakes buying trust systems, but I can't think up a good argument against it at the moment.  I would need examples etc.  Can this be abused to shake people down?  I get a large stake behind me, we find legitimate business and bad rep them unless they pay up.  What prevents this ?
I don't think these concerns have merit.  As soon as you try to blackmail someone that person will distrust you and makes the situation publically known.  Then if you are trying to go around doing this to everyone, they all distrust you and you seem to distrust everyone and people talk so it's not hard to figure out what's going on here.

I agree having to register first is ridiculous, but that is an issue with the exchanges forcing that requirement.  I suppose that for BTSX waiting 30 days is somewhat reasonable, where for KeyID DAC it would be a killer.  It just seems strange to me.  There will be a certain subset of guys who are actually involved in this process.  The naming thing just isn't important enough to justify this auction type system and all the weird market that'll occur in the background.  It just makes BTSX all that more complicated in a way that doesn't really bring enough value.  The names are meant to aid ease of use, we're going backwards trying to create yet another market within the system.

The person blackmailing doesn't have to be known and can move their stake around at will.  I would need to study the issue more if this isn't true.

This also doesn't solve spoof scammers.  If I understand correctly, those spoof bter type accounts that get random deposits can be negative mined at which point they show up on the market again.  What prevents a scammer from doing the whole thing again?  It is up to bter to try and vote these guys down  ?  I am not sure there is a big incentive from others.
Gamey, you are not understanding these issues at all.

I does solve spoof scammers... The user names never even become active because when someone tries to register them (must pay for this) they have no chance to out-mine the community/exchanges.  Mining has an opportunity cost in that they can't build a reputation on a name they can actually keep and their misbehavior is not rewarded...  Blackmailers can't "hide"; all these transactions are publically auditable... in the worst case for bad actors they risk having their staked forked/removed from the network.

Reputation is not some "needless distraction."  It is important, useful, and a problem that a lot of people have been trying to solve.

Offline gamey

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Waiting 30 days to get your username is horrible for adoption.

I'm thinking of the username more as a luxury.  I would want it so it is not necessary to get started and use the system.  I think the current "chicken and egg" situation where you need to ask someone to register you is a little ridiculous.

I want to dislike the idea of large stakes buying trust systems, but I can't think up a good argument against it at the moment.  I would need examples etc.  Can this be abused to shake people down?  I get a large stake behind me, we find legitimate business and bad rep them unless they pay up.  What prevents this ?
I don't think these concerns have merit.  As soon as you try to blackmail someone that person will distrust you and makes the situation publically known.  Then if you are trying to go around doing this to everyone, they all distrust you and you seem to distrust everyone and people talk so it's not hard to figure out what's going on here.

I agree having to register first is ridiculous, but that is an issue with the exchanges forcing that requirement.  I suppose that for BTSX waiting 30 days is somewhat reasonable, where for KeyID DAC it would be a killer.  It just seems strange to me.  There will be a certain subset of guys who are actually involved in this process.  The naming thing just isn't important enough to justify this auction type system and all the weird market that'll occur in the background.  It just makes BTSX all that more complicated in a way that doesn't really bring enough value.  The names are meant to aid ease of use, we're going backwards trying to create yet another market within the system.

The person blackmailing doesn't have to be known and can move their stake around at will.  I would need to study the issue more if this isn't true.

This also doesn't solve spoof scammers.  If I understand correctly, those spoof bter type accounts that get random deposits can be negative mined at which point they show up on the market again.  What prevents a scammer from doing the whole thing again?  It is up to bter to try and vote these guys down  ?  I am not sure there is a big incentive from others.
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Offline bytemaster

The burn isn't really a means to define reputation, but can be done for vanity purposes. 
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Offline emski

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  I think the current "chicken and egg" situation where you need to ask someone to register you is a little ridiculous.

Again check the first proposal here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9075.0

It should allow us to get rid of "Post here if you want 1 BTSX" threads.

Offline Agent86

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Waiting 30 days to get your username is horrible for adoption.

I'm thinking of the username more as a luxury.  I would want it so it is not necessary to get started and use the system.  I think the current "chicken and egg" situation where you need to ask someone to register you is a little ridiculous.

I want to dislike the idea of large stakes buying trust systems, but I can't think up a good argument against it at the moment.  I would need examples etc.  Can this be abused to shake people down?  I get a large stake behind me, we find legitimate business and bad rep them unless they pay up.  What prevents this ?
I don't think these concerns have merit.  As soon as you try to blackmail someone that person will distrust you and makes the situation publically known.  Then if you are trying to go around doing this to everyone, they all distrust you and you seem to distrust everyone and people talk so it's not hard to figure out what's going on here.


Offline Agent86

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I think the proposal has merit... in concept. The trick is implementation and BM/devs will need to chime in.

Not completely sold on whether the advantages outweigh the increased complexity; open Bazaar has some pretty convincing material on proof-of-burn for rep.

Could you perhaps elaborate on the aspects of proof-of-burn that you feel are inadequate or undesirable?

Well I don't have to burn my stake; that's a good enough reason for me.  Really it just creates the wrong incentives because you don't really want to burn stake and makes people reluctant to participate to get the rep so the rep isn't very representative of anything IMO.

Offline gamey

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Waiting 30 days to get your username is horrible for adoption.  I want to dislike the idea of large stakes buying trust systems, but I can't think up a good argument against it at the moment.  I would need examples etc.  Can this be abused to shake people down?  I get a large stake behind me, we find legitimate business and bad rep them unless they pay up.  What prevents this ?
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Offline oldman

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I think the proposal has merit... in concept. The trick is implementation and BM/devs will need to chime in.

Not completely sold on whether the advantages outweigh the increased complexity; open Bazaar has some pretty convincing material on proof-of-burn for rep.

Could you perhaps elaborate on the aspects of proof-of-burn that you feel are inadequate or undesirable?


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.

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.

Do you remember the case with Mike Rowe ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft
How can you fight that?
My opinion is that once mined/registered names should be personal and only in extreme cases they should be revoked.
Something at least 100000x your stake.