Hacker News Reader

Thanks! What we have for v1 of the protocol is really the starting point. There are also other extensions that could support subjective information. For example, it could be similar to Reddit's upvoting system. You can stake 100 tokens to say Domino's has the best pizza, and I can counter with 200 tokens to say Papa John's is better. Items are ranked on the list based on the token stake. There would be no challenges or voting in this model.

View on HN

What prevents entities who can afford to lose the most tokens from establishing what is listed as 'correct'? What mechanisms are there to prevent those with the greatest token number from establishing what is accurate?

Two parts:

1. Economic - you stand to lose the tokens. Similar to mining on bitcoin, the cost to spam the network is proportional to the value of the network. If there are a lot of users, the value of the token is higher and it will be more expensive to acquire the tokens needed to game the system. Even if you are well funded, this will hurt.

2. Reader disinterest - There is the negative feedback loop where users of the information will stop using the information, and the incentive to game the system will drop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com