Here's my bitcoin-otc rating:
http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=Herodes&sign=ANY&type=RECVWhen I looked at it just now, I received a -10 rating from someone named Supa, and by looking at it, it seems he's been giving a lot of people a -10 rating. This is immature, foolish and scammy.
I never traded with this guy, and if you check around on bitcoin-otc, you can see that lots of big names, like sturles and Nanotube also got neg-rated. So this is obvious misuse.
Can we fix this somehow, or protect against it in the future ?
Should bitcoin-otc be invite only perhaps, so that only users with good ratings could add friends or people they think are honest ? Seems like giving avg. joe access is destined for failure, what if someone sets up lots of users and makes ratings of legit users seem bad ? Unless there's some protections in place, that would be possible.
Now, this is not a very big deal for seasoned traders, and I won't lose any sleep over it, but when trying to do some deals, newcomers may be scared off if I have a -10 on my scoresheet so to speak.
What do you guys think ? Perhaps in cases like this is should be possible to speak to Nanotube and have the user in question blocked from making feedback, but I guess that would be futile as he'd only make a new account..
It doesn't seem like a problem to me.
The concept of a Web of Trust relies on a chain of people connecting parties. If you've never traded with this guy, and I've never traded with him, then the -10 won't matter. If he's in our connecting chain, a quick glance will show what you just discovered - that the guy has a history of issuing only negative reviews.
WoT isn't a score intended to verify that you're cool; it's only intended to give some background information to help me make that decision.
As an aside, there's no reason an improved WoT couldn't be built so that transactions were input prior to them taking place, and the initiation signed with both parties' keys. Then, only verified transactions would hit the network.
Know a programming language?
If you can import user data from the existing system, you could build this as an overlay.