Bitarch replies:

You wrote a review of my reputation proposal, but it seems you didn’t understand the exact essence of the idea. You write:

As for the system you proposed, people will be willing to take its recommendations into account only if, for some reason, it becomes very important to them that a person, for the sake of increasing their reputation, be willing to contribute to charity.

The main goal of the system is not to show one’s generosity to others, but to create a mechanism for the value of a reputational entity, which will then be a pity to lose. Game theory comes into play, making deceiving other people economically disadvantageous. The original idea was proposed by the developers of the OpenBazaar project; I modified it for application in real society.

Reputation Pledges
OpenBazaar implements proof-of-burn in a different way. On the OpenBazaar network, users can choose to be pseudonymous, meaning you don’t know their true identity. As such, it can sometimes be difficult to determine if they are trustworthy or should be avoided. A reputation system is important to help inform the network of which participants have acted honestly in the past, and which haven’t. There are several facets to the OpenBazaar reputation system, which is still being built, and you can read about the overall system here. One part of this system is Reputation Pledges. This means that a user has chosen to prove their commitment to their OpenBazaar identity by burning a certain amount of bitcoin. The act of burning coins shows the network that the user is committed to their identity because they’ve now expended resources on it, and if they incur a negative reputation then those resources will have gone to waste.

https://openbazaar.org/blog/proof-of-burn-and-reputation-pledges

Indeed, that’s roughly how reputation works. “No one remembers McFlurry the bridge builder! But once I fucked a goat…”

Thank you for the clarification that charity in the proposed engine is not that important, the main thing is the willingness itself to confirm one’s reliability through the expenditure of resources. This could indeed prove important for an outsider to gain traction on a particular trading platform. They could spend money on advertising, or instead, or in addition, spend it on boosting their karma, and this would also perfectly demonstrate their willingness to play fair.

But I thought it important to note that it is pointless to try and stretch any such mechanisms to fit all cases in life. A person can be honest and respectable, like Alexei Karenin, but his wife will still throw herself under a train because in her eyes, he is an inhuman machine.