As pr.
http://wiki.bitcoin-otc.com/wiki/OTC_Rating_System10 You trust this person as you trust yourself. Reserve this for close friends and associates you know in person.
8 Large number of high-value transactions, long period of association, very trustworthy.
5 You've had a number of good transactions with this person.
1 One or two good transactions with this person
-1 Person strikes you as a bit flaky. Unreasonable/unexpected delays in payment, etc.
-10 Person failed to hold up his end of the bargain, took payment and ran, fraudster.
When you have a certain number of ratings, you would mostly like to keep it all as positive as possible when you're a trader.
I see a problem with the rating system however, as when you rate somebody negatively, you may be rated back negatively as well. For instance,
if you're a reputable and honest trader, and then you have less than a pleaseant experience with a counterparty, and you want to give negative feedback
on that person, I've seen the case is often that the one receiving the negative rate becomes grumpy and rates you negatively back.
This gives the incentive of honest and reputable traders not to leave any negative feedback, because then their own WOT-rating may receive a negative rating.
Esp. for traders that doesn't yet have a high volume of trades, this could be a problem. For instance if a trader has 4 positive feedbacks, and then receives one negative
feedback, this may deterr others from making trade with that person.
As usual, everything is fine and dandy as long as everyone smiles (ie. rates positively), but once the negative ratings come in, there can be conflict.
In principle I think it should be possible for traders to make notes to the community about possible scammers or possible flakey traders, however, all this is a trust issue,
and speaking negatively about others, or rating others negatively may backfire, so I think many doesn't rate -1 if they deal with a sketchy trader to protect their own reputation.
Then less experienced traders meet that sketchy trader and get burned.
How would you suggest solving this ?
Hm.. I was thinking, would it be possible for traders that have reached a certain trust level to give 'anonymous' ratings to a scammer or wouldbe-scammer so the scammer could not rate neagtively back ? Then the orginator of the negative rate wold be hidden to the one receiving it, but the admins could check who gave it, and reverse it if it seems sketchy.
