On 8/25/06, Michael Rogers <m.rogers at cs.ucl.ac.uk> wrote: > * Can reputations be negative as well as positive? > > * If reputations can be negative, how do you prevent nodes from > generating new identities to escape bad reputations (whitewashing)? > > * If reputations can only be positive, do new nodes start with a zero > reputation or a slightly positive reputation? > > * If new nodes start with a zero reputation, why should anyone trust them? > > * If new nodes start with a slightly positive reputation, how do you > prevent nodes from generating new identities to return to a slightly > positive reputation (whitewashing again)?
Starting with a neutral reputation and the ability to have both positive and negative reputations is exactly equivalent to starting with a slightly positive reputation and the ability to have only positive reputations. I would argue that since the only absolute reference point is a new node, it ought to have reputation 0 by definition. And there's no reason not to allow negative reps, but we should assume that any node that has a negative rep will ditch its old identity, and therefore negative reps are useful only if they can be tied to something hard to change, like one of our darknet links. Evan
