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RE: User Authority - A Better Reputation System With Interesting Applications
I would be surprised if the UA-algorithm cannot be gamed, and I would be even more surprised if it can be used securely to identify real unique persons ... at least as long as it only pulls data available from the current blockchain. But I like to be surprised ... good luck with it :-)
Every algorithm can be gamed, but gaming UA is very hard, and on top of that I can alter the formulae (change weights, increase/decrease the damping factors, change how Omega virtually follows and a number of other tweaks and tunings).
UA is not about revealing people's real life identities: but it does effectively predict which accounts are run by humans, by bots, and which accounts are alts.
So in the end of the day it's you who decides who should get a good UA and who shouldn't? :-)
But yeah ... protocols hard-coded in the consensus layer will always be a difficult beast to tame, a slow-moving target while the people that really want to game the system can move around very quickly. People will always be upset about all the gaming and will always complain and whine and eventually argue. As an open-source add-on-the-top API service people the algorithm can be tuned anytime and people who don't like the way you are tuning it are welcome to put up their alternative version of UA.
I hope we'll see it rolled out and in use soon (even if I doubt it's a silver bullet), and I think I may agree with @glenalbrethsen that the reputation system ought to be scrapped. While I think the reputation system isn't completely flawed, I see no reason why we need such a scoring system as a part of the consensus algorithm.
Sometimes things work in a very serendipitous manner. Thanks @tobixen, for tagging me, or I would have missed this completely.
I suppose this is why we can't have nice things. That even a protocol that is meant to give folks a proper ranking has the chance, however less easy that it may be, to be gamed. Worse than that, however, is that people will even try to game UA, because they will still find it better to spend however long it takes to get around it than basically working the system the way it was intended.
If all of that time effort could be harnessed and channeled for good... :)
Answered in the top comment!