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Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by dane-pgp on Sunday January 14, 2018 @09:16PM (#16147974)
The feature you are looking for is not "censorship" but "reputation metrics" (in fact, they should be "uncensorable reputation metrics"). If a trusted third party (not necessarily Uber) told you whether a given driver had insurance, then your decision to transact with the driver could be based on that. (More likely, whoever made the app you use would do the "has insurance" check for you, and not show you any drivers that don't have insurance, and they would list this filtering as a feature of the app).

As for who is going to pay for this, the users can still pay money for the individual apps (perhaps they would get a commission from each ride they enable, unless a Free Software alternative emerged), and the app makers could pay a licensing fee to the third party that provides the insurance check or other reputation metric.

The real unsolved problem is how to decentralise a reputation system without it being subject to Sybil attacks or breaching people's privacy.

Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by adrianN on Monday January 15, 2018 @04:57AM (#16149604)
This only shift the responsibility. Now those with the authority to provide a good reputation decide who gets to sell their goods. For example you would probably have a problem with dangerous electronics in a decentralized market. Only experts can tell you whether the USB charger you're looking at is safe, so whoever moves first to become the defacto authority for electronics safety in that marketplace effectively controls who can sell.

Not that I think that this is a bad thing. As a consumer I want somebody else to take care that the things that I can buy don't kill me and I wouldn't trust some random commenters on the Internet for that kind of information.

Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by sharemywin on Monday January 15, 2018 @02:21PM (#16152715)
The world/internet as a whole is trying to figure out how to manage delegating authority(trust) aka fake news etc.

I think we are in the process of transferring from institutional authority to algorithmic authority.

Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by cgmg on Monday January 15, 2018 @01:50AM (#16148994)
Proof of Burn solves the reputation problem. Here's an example: https://www.openbazaar.org/blog/why-proof-of-burn/.
Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by mythrwy on Monday January 15, 2018 @12:52AM (#16148774)
To get a bad reputation some people must be burnt first.

And when the rep gets bad enough, no worries if it's a censorship/ban free platform. Just start over.

So there are some moral hazards. (Not that they can't be overcome.)

Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by avip on Monday January 15, 2018 @05:16AM (#16149669)
Looking at existing "reputation metrics" (amazon, yelp, TA) I can't help being pessimistic about the concept of self-regulating distributed reputation.
Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by tiuPapa on Sunday January 14, 2018 @11:38PM (#16148511)
Can a blockchain like steem be used to solve the reputation problem?
Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by annabellish on Monday January 15, 2018 @04:00AM (#16149400)
Blockchains propose a flawed solution to a specific problem. The issue that cryptocurrencies and friends are having at the moment is that there's a lot of other unsolved problems standing in the way of what they're trying to do, and those are difficult problems.

Which is to say, the question "Can a blockchain be used to solve [X]?" is answered "No" for almost every question.

Re:Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces by tiuPapa on Monday January 15, 2018 @10:24AM (#16151024)
Ah okay. What kind of flaws and what kind of unsolved problems?

Note: I am not trying to contradict you here, just looking to understand this whole thing from a different angle.