From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 94 20:38:50 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: digital reputation capital
In-Reply-To: <199409091646.MAA16843@bwh.harvard.edu>
Message-ID: <199409100338.UAA09358@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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