[darawk]

> A jewel seller would have an incentive to stake a lot of tokens on inclusion in the list; but who would have an incentive to stake as many tokens against the inclusion? Hand-made jewelry sellers, but bystander effect may apply.

The other owners of the tokens! That's the conceit of a TCR. The owners of the tokens have an incentive to maintain their value. The value of their tokens comes from their ability to get you onto the list of that token. The value of being on that list comes from the prestige of the list (i.e. its track record of honesty/quality).

> And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller?

They could do this, but again, they'd be doing it at some cost to the prestige of their list.

[progval]

And how would someone check for the prestige/track record of such a list?

[darawk]

The same way you know the prestige of say, the NY times. Just reputation, developed by consistently meeting certain standards.

[progval]

The NYT works as a trusted third-party, because it curates a lot of information. That does not work for a narrow-focused piece of information like a jewelry list

[markerdmann]

At the same time, it's possible for the NYT to hire a curator who doesn't act in your best interest. Jayson Blair is a good example of that problem.

If there were an economic incentive to challenge facts published by the NYT, would Blair's deception have persisted for several years? It's even possible that a subject in one of his stories would stake tokens to challenge the accuracy of the story. Blair could then respond by voting against the challenge with a large number of tokens, but would other parties join Blair or the challenger? They would probably investigate further and effectively join the challenge as neutral arbiters. The incentive on both sides is to provide persuasive information to win votes. The direct token incentive for the neutral parties is two-fold: vote with the winning side to gain tokens, and increase the value of the tokens they hold by helping the registry to become more popular so that demand for the tokens increases. If consumers of the registry value accuracy, that incentivizes the entire network to fiercely defend the accuracy of the data.

[yinyinwu]

Curating trusted data for narrow-focused markets is a feature for DIRT. Before Amazon sold books back in the day, it was hard to buy a specialty text book at your local bookstore.

If you need to find trusted data, a curator exists only if the market for that information is large enough.