There's an untrusted list?
Sorry, I guess I stated this incorrectly. I guess what I meant was I have given negative feedback on one individual whose debt I covered while trying to fix a BTC-E account restoration for him and who ended up running away with the Bitcoin. He ended up being basically a 16-year-old kid. My bad, I guess. I only lost 22.5 BTC, and we both learned a lesson from it.
There's basically 4 major parts to trust that everyone should know:1) Trust List + Trust Depth: For me, I only put people that I have had a personal trade with in Bitcoins in my Trust List. Regardless of how I feel about someone's trustworthiness, I wouldn't feel comfortable putting them in my own Trust List unless I've done an actual deal with them. The Trust List itself will show ratings of people you've dealt with, plus the ratings of the next level or two based on the factor of "Trust Depth". By default, it contains a list of users that, presumably, theymos trusts, but only comes with 2 Trust Depth. You should increase this Trust Depth to 3 to see more how Trust works and why it can be powerful. As others have stated, two of those users themselves have questionable rapport with the community as a whole, but for the most part, the list kind of serves as a basis for
something that users can reasonably rely on anyway.
The next few points can be viewed for my own user account
here2) Trusted feedback: This is your own trusted feedback, as received by another user. If it's positive, it's black, if it is negative, it's red. Here I presently see that I have one trusted feedback from serp, who I bought physical Bitcoin from. You can have both positive and negative feedback.
3) Untrusted feedback: This is your own feedback again, but from users you do not trust or do not yet trust. Again, positive is black, negative is red. I
think that if you look at my feedback list, you'll see serp as "Untrusted feedback", likely because he's not in the default trust.
4) Sent feedback: This is the trust reviews of the user you are currently viewing. Here on my page you'll see I have an unspecified BTC positive trust for Keefe, who helped a lot of us purchase our first BTC back in the early days. I also, like many others, had positive dealings with Casascius early on. This is also where I have my one negative rating for another user.
If there's only one thing I'd implore everyone to do, it'd be to start giving feedback and to add folks to your trust list that you trust. The more of us that use it, the more valuable it becomes, and the less we'll have to worry about scammers. The only problem with the trust system is that it requires
you to do most of the work yourself, you're not going to necessarily be rewarded for giving others ratings, but it seems quite silly to NOT use this system if we have it.
Once enough people are using it, the need for a "Default Trust" will go away and be replaced by trust systems whereby folks you already know and trust are basically automatically telling you who they trust without having to independently communicate it. You can even tweak the Trust Depth to be high or low accordingly. It's actually quite powerful for something so simple.
