> If you stay within your clique you severely limit the number of possible merchants and if you trust them through personal relationship or foaf why go through the hassle of an escrow system like this?
Because as you increase the radius of your search, in a small-world netwok, you reach a very large number of real people while being minimally impacted by Sybil cliques. Check out the work on SybilGuard or SybilInfer for instance.
>Ok so how about I just sell a bunch of high value "items" between my own accounts? Now my account has participated in a number of valid high value transactions. Since it is distributed there is no way to ensure the transaction is real.
Ah, but you're looking for transactions reported by people who are themselves close to your circles of trust.
> Who build their trustworthiness the same way. This is easy to game look at pagerank for an example of a similar rating system.
A random surfer model is a naive model. With better probabilistic model, you become more resilient to gaming.
> This isn't actually true though because you don't verify the data in any way(nor can you) so an attacker can craft the input to tell any story they want.
This isn't arbitrary data, it's data connected to you in some way.
Because as you increase the radius of your search, in a small-world netwok, you reach a very large number of real people while being minimally impacted by Sybil cliques. Check out the work on SybilGuard or SybilInfer for instance.
>Ok so how about I just sell a bunch of high value "items" between my own accounts? Now my account has participated in a number of valid high value transactions. Since it is distributed there is no way to ensure the transaction is real.
Ah, but you're looking for transactions reported by people who are themselves close to your circles of trust.
> Who build their trustworthiness the same way. This is easy to game look at pagerank for an example of a similar rating system.
A random surfer model is a naive model. With better probabilistic model, you become more resilient to gaming.
> This isn't actually true though because you don't verify the data in any way(nor can you) so an attacker can craft the input to tell any story they want.
This isn't arbitrary data, it's data connected to you in some way.