Reputation System Concept

Since the appearance of distributed computer systems without centralized governance, verifying the reputation of participants has been a problem. This problem has been studied in its many aspects. A reliable way to determine reputation is critical for peer-to-peer marketplaces, where every node in the network can communicate with every other node.

The standard theoretical framework for such a solution comes from the Byzantine Generals Problem, which features a variable number of participants (with variable levels of trust) voting independently in order to reach a decision that is to be recorded in a public ledger so that it will be known to the entire community.

There is a risk of an attacker spinning up many malicious nodes which act together to take over the consensus in the attacker’s favor. We need to design defenses against this.

Current implementations of blockchain technology use various forms of weighted voting to reach consensus. Some weight by tokens staked and others by computational power, for example. Each consensus algorithm provides certain heuristics for estimating the trustworthiness of a node.