digital reputation capital

I'm currently writing up a design for a digital reputation
capital system.  The intent is not to provide a framework for
licensing or formal endorsement system, but instead, allow people to
automatically discover the opinions of others about various entities.

	I'd like to know how much people would want anonymity in a
system like this.  My preferred solution would be to allow anonymity
through the established services of remailers.  This has the advantage
of having people who use a nym constantly (and well) get more respect
when doing it then those who use a nym occasionally.

	The reason this solution is preferred is that it allows a
fully distributed system to exist, with no centralization needed at
all.  Is losing that distributed characteristic of the system worth
gaining a system that supports anonymity?

	(It might be possible to design a work intensive system to
handle distributed anonymity, based on Merritt's protocol for voting
without any central facility (Applied Crypt section 6.5), but the
amount of work involved is quite high, thus the system wouldn't work
in a production environment.)

Adam

Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu> writes:
>	I'm currently writing up a design for a digital reputation
>capital system.  The intent is not to provide a framework for
>licensing or formal endorsement system, but instead, allow people to
>automatically discover the opinions of others about various entities.

At one time there was something similar to this called the Hawthorne
Exchange (or HEX) associated with the Extropians list.  Various entities
(like people and nyms, and later, confusingly, ideas) could be registered
and people could buy and sell "shares" in these registered entities.
The market price of a share was supposed to in some sense represent
the value of the reputation.  At least, that's how I understood it.  The
goals were never 100% clear to me.

It did not seem to work very well.  You need to give people an
incentive to participate, to register their opinions.  Because you
could actually make "monetary units" by buying low and selling high,
there seemed to be a lot of volatility and price manipulation in the
market, especially since there wasn't much to tie the prices to
reality.  You might check on the Extropians list for more information.

Hal