Re: Payments and Trust

On 27 September 2012 02:39, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> On 09/23/2012 02:59 PM, Amir Taaki wrote:
> > Anyway the purpose of this rant is that if we use trust networks for
> > payments, then you better be sure that your trust network is pretty
> > fucking solid. If it can be gamed, then people will put in insane
> > hours to do it for $1 or less. I like the idea of thinking about
> > them in terms of sets of overlays, but I feel like perhaps there
> > might be more to this story. Perhaps there is a way to describe the
> > relationships between overlays in a set. Or maybe the way nodes in
> > this directed graph weight the trust values that aggregate along
> > them.
>
> This.
>
> We (Digital Bazaar) has been thinking about the trust issue related to
> payments for quite a long time. At present, we've conceived of a number
> of ideas, but nothing that we would want to depend on as an automatic
> part of the transaction process. Trust is not only variable between the
> type of operation you're attempting to perform (buy a piece of digital
> music from an unknown vendor), it can also be variable based on /who/ is
> doing the purchase and /who/ is doing the selling and /what/ is being
> exchanged. The saying "Honor among thieves" captures this trust issue
> quite well. You can't trust a thief, but some thieves trust each other.
>
> I do think that there is a technology solution for the Web Payments
> problem (creating an open, decentralized, payment mechanism for the
> Web). I do not think that there is a technology "solution" for the trust
> network problem because it is constantly evolving. That is, your trust
> network is only good until it gets gamed. Building something that is
> game-proof is going to have to be an iterative, long-term effort. An
> effort that has no end. It's certainly something worth attempting, but
> definitely not something that should be standardized at any point in the
> near future.
>
> That said, one of the reasons PaySwarm utilizes URIs for 'Identities'
> and JSON-LD to represent information is precisely because of the unknown
> nature of the trust problem. The same goes for the payments problem. We
> assume that we're not going to get it right the first time, or the
> second time, or the third time. You need flexibility in the system to
> change over time and URIs and Linked Data empower you to do that.
>
> So, here's what we have in PaySwarm so far that can be applied to make
> good in-roads on the trust network problem:
>
> 1. People and Organizations can have multiple identities on PaySwarm.
>    For example: https://dev.payswarm.com/i/manu
> 2. Information about that identity can be expressed as Linked Data on
>    the site where the identity exists, and on any other site on the Web.
> 3. Anybody on the Web can make statements about the identity above.
>    These statements can include praise, complaints, referrals, and a
>    variety of other "signals" that can help an individual decide
>    whether or not to transact with the other party.
>
> Given the above, we've been thinking of making PaySwarm Authority
> software be able to vouch for identities on the network. For example:
>
> * This identity has performed 104 successful transactions.
> * This identity has had 4 complaints logged against it.
> * This identity has performed $5,400 worth of transactions without
>   complaint (dangerous privacy implications).
> * This identity has performed at least 100 transactions in the
>   price range that you are about to exchange. 98% of those
>   transactions happened successfully and without complaint.
>
> We want to do this in a Web-y way, for example, here's the JSON-LD
> expressing the last bullet item above:
>
> {
>   '@context': 'http://purl.org/payswarm/v1',
>   'id': 'https://dev.payswarm.com/i/manu',
>   'price': {
>      'amount': '25.00',
>      'currency': 'USD'
>   },
>   'priceVariance': '5.00', // acceptable % variance in price above
>   'transactionCount': 100,
>   'transactionSuccessRate': '98.0' // % of successful transactions
> }
>
> It'll be easier to put this together after we have some good live data
> in the system.
>

Nice!

I think creating reputation data and not necessarily 'trust inferences' is
the way to start.

What you describe is similar to bitcoin OTC web of trust

http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratings.php

Note also there's a old trust vocab here :

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/trust/11.2/d11.2_trust_vocabularies.html


>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Which is better - RDFa Lite or Microdata?
> http://manu.sporny.org/2012/mythical-differences/
>
>