Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by moe 4202 days ago
All your concerns are valid but addressable via "reputation".

Consider this: Each completed transaction is rated by each participating party.

How much your rating affects your opponents reputation in determined by your own reputation. A higher reputation enables privileges such as more peers willing to trade with you, faster downloads, etc.

These reputation systems don't work in common P2P networks because everyone can just generate fake identities and boost their own reputation at will.

However, if you tie the reputation system to bitcoin so that the creation of an identity puts actual money on the line then this kind of cheating doesn't work anymore.