Is a person credentials would help make the e-bay seller's fraud tactic harder. (I only read briefly about the case, but I think he made use of lots of personas to talk up his own reliability and merchandize quality; if this is not what he did the hypothetical stands anyway).
To perpetrate his type of fraud the user would then have to bribe other people to sell him their is-a-person credential. Also, though I thought e-bay attempt to do this, you would think that lots of votes from new users with no reputation should not count for as much as a few votes from other people with existing reputations. Adam On Sat, Mar 02, 2002 at 03:01:15PM -0600, Neil Johnson wrote: > > So how does one respond to comments, in light of these current (and past) > events, on the idea that no-one will be able to "trust" the reputations > of anonymous brokers, sellers, or issuers. > > All were supposedly trusted and respected institutions that had established > track records that suddenly collapsed. > > I'm most fascinated by the E-bay case where a seller of collectible ceramics > was able to build quite a positive reputation and then leverage that > reputation to bilk buyers out of a few hundreds of thousands of dollars. > > At least we know this guy's name. In an anonymous world we wouldn't even have > that. > > I suppose that the risk of fraud could be reduced by the use of "insurers" > that would have to ante up money if a party reneged on a contract (and > perhaps knows the identity of that party). But what prevents that insurer > from becoming an "Anderson" ? > > How is our hypothetical "Joe Six-Pack" going to be able to buy into anonymous > entities when this kind of risk is probably a certainty. > > -Neil
