Non-censurable ratings

[JustinDrake]

Currently a buyer will privately share a rating to a vendor when she completes her order. It is then assumed that the vendor will faithfully host ratings on his store. This design allows the vendor to censor bad ratings.

Similar to how offline messages are handled, we could have the buyer broadcast the rating pointer to the DHT and publish the rating payload to the gateways. The main difference with offline messages is that the rating payload is unencrypted. By publicly sharing ratings, this severely limits the censurability of bad ratings. (For example, this would guarantee that ratings get picked up by players such as Duo crawling and scraping the network.)

Bad ratings are especially important for OpenBazaar (more so than good ratings) because good ratings are trivial to fake. We can assume that bad ratings do not come from the vendor and are therefore significantly more genuine. My understanding is that in the dark markets reputation is largely based on bad ratings, where a single bad rating could ruin the whole reputation of a vendor.

[cpacia]

Superseded by #499

[JustinDrake]

What? cc @hoffmabc

[hoffmabc]

No it's not @cpacia. This isn't a linter issue.

[cpacia]

I thought about doing this before, but in addition to substantially more data in the dht, it still would rely on a third party seeding the data.

[JustinDrake]

it still would rely on a third party seeding the data

Do you mean like the hardcoded gateways for offline messages? That would be no worse than for offline messages, and is better than only having the vendor host ratings. If more decentralisation proves to be necessary I think it's reasonable to have non-gateway OpenBazaar nodes optionally (either opt-in or opt-out) seed the ratings, acting as some sort of lightweight storage nodes similar to complement the DHT. Ratings have a known max size which is very small (compared to images and listings).

[cpacia]

Candidate for pubsub channel