Bitrated Adds Reputation System, Offering ‘Chargeback-Like’ Process to Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Bitrated Adds Reputation System, Offering ‘Chargeback-Like’ Process to Bitcoin

cointelegraph.com

4 pointsnadaviv7 comments

Hey everyone, Nadav from Bitrated here. Bitrated is a trust platform that combines identity & reputation management, smart contracts for reversible payments and a marketplace for trusted agents to serve as arbitrators.

Happy to answer your questions!

Hi Nadaviv. Great job on the platform so far.

I wrestle with how feasible it is for systems like this to be decentralized. Bitrated is centralized. If your site shuts down or is shut the service ends. But being centralized makes it convenient and useful.

My question is this: Do you have any goals to become more decentralized as decentralization technology evolves? If so, are there any plans you care to share?

Great question. Yes, Bitrated is indeed centralized, but strives for a model that requires putting as little trust as possible on the service operator.

For example - user reviews, contracts and profile fields are signed with the user's ECDSA key, to make it possible to independently verify its authenticity and prevent tampering by third parties (or even by Bitrated itself). All the information is also freely available via open APIs, to make it easily archivable. User funds are fully recoverable in case Bitrated shuts down.

I would say that many of the benefits that can be gained from decentralized technologies can in fact also be achieved by using standard cryptography and leveraging the blockchain technology in smart ways. We have some interesting plans in regards to that.

We expanded more on that here:

https://www.bitrated.com/security#trustless-server-model

https://www.bitrated.com/security#cryptography-backed-digita...

We choose that route because building a decentralized solution requires a lot of additional resources, effort and time, and we believe that the Bitcoin ecosystem needs to have a working solution today. But we'll definitely be considering an even more decentralized approach as the technology evolves.

I'm a trust agent on Bitrated, a big fan of the project. Centralization makes it easier to get a system like this off the ground, so this is a great start.

I'm also the operations lead on another project, OpenBazaar. It's a decentralized network for trade that includes the same type of system as Bitrated. It's not as far along, or well polished, because decentralization is really hard to build.

Only time will tell if these types of systems will be more popular centralized, decentralized, or perhaps a federated model in-between.

Why would both sides of the transaction use this? Even if it works well, what is better to a merchant than a permanent transaction? And if it is better to only consumers, who would then put pressure on merchants to accept it (in theory) how will you get consumers to put pressure on merchants to overcome what may be a lack of incentives on the merchant side?

Merchants could adopt this to gain a competitive advantage over others that don't offer any buyer protection to their customers. In conjunction with rising consumer demand, we believe the market will eventually settle on a standard buyer protection process using some form of dispute mediation (which may or may not be Bitrated).

Great work! And IMHO its ok that you started in centralized way. But do you have any plans for decentralization? I feel huge demand from crypto community for decentralized trust platform.

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