Submit your questions before the Forum AMA (text-based) on Thursday, September 12th @ 10AM EST (2PM UTC). The Sacred Capital team will answer between 10AM-11AM EST. This AMA thread is now closed. If you have questions after the planned AMA, feel free to ask them here.
We’re posting details about our project over the next few days on this thread. Leave your questions as a Reply, and we’ll address them during the scheduled AMA.
Posting some qns here ahead of AMA: Could you share how reputation staking works? and why would it be easier for users to build reputation through your app VS user’s own activities/interaction within their app? and more details on revenue model?
What is the Reputation Economy?
Distributed ledgers are enabling a peer to peer paradigm, but there’s something more afoot. We’re witnessing the foundations of a whole new economy being built on the basis of reputation.
It’s an economic system that lets you accelerate engagements, spark new kinds of interactions and interplay with money on the basis of context. It’s a wealth system that’s centred around you.
If you’re an app-creator or an individual enthusiastic about the new economy - stay tuned - we’re about to release more details ahead of our AMA!
Distributed networks don’t always have the benefit of overarching regulatory systems or centralised algorithms to guide our interactions. But instead, they rely on underlying reputations so that people can seek each other out and engage in whole new ways.
In the late 1930’s, principles of Distributed economics were expounded upon by Gandhian economists such as J. C. Kumarappa and furthered by E. F Schumacher. The crux of their work was this - Reputation, when built as an economy can foster fascinating new P2P interactions.
So what does this mean for you?
If you’re an entrepreneur building in Holochain’s Agent Centric environment, you can leverage Reputation systems to engage your users in a radically different manner. Reputation Labs helps you design and architect reputation specifically for your applications.
The Reputation Interchange helps individuals navigate this new economic system in a truly agent centric way. It’s a set of standards, staking protocols and dashboards that let you harness the power of your reputation across applications!
If you have a question for the AMA, drop it in the thread below.
The Distributed Web is fundamentally suited to bringing the reputation economy alive. Why? The agent centric nature of applications means data isn’t locked in silos. A user now has the freedom to expose data and reputation across apps in a fluid, hyper-collaborative manner.
That implies you don’t enter each application with a blank sanitised slate, awaiting a centralised algorithm to show you the next post or blog. By leveraging the reputation economy, you can lean on existing relationships to guide your engagement in the app you’ve just downloaded.
As an entrepreneur, it means you don’t need to build centralised algorithms to define your user experience. By importing reputations you can accelerate engagements between users, even without holding a universal snapshot of data.
AMA question: In your interview The Yin and Yang of Wealth you say:
“We now know that the problems of climate change, lack of emotional well-being, and inequity can’t be solved with material capital alone. They require organised efforts to facilitate cultural shifts, re-building social fabric, information sharing and more.”
How do you see reputational currencies contributing to the resolution of such problems?
Is there not a danger that reputational currencies will only create a different type of inequality - one based on reputation?
Also in the interview:
“A formal reputation economy will allow us to think of organisations as dynamic and evolutionary instead of static.”
How, exactly, will a reputation economy help us to think of organisations as dynamic and evolutionary instead of static?
I love what you guys are doing and was great chatting the other day! 
As I said on the call, my main concern is sometimes misunderstandings and mis-communications can occur and then its like that person will have a black mark against their name for all eternity? Then people would avoid working with them and they will be at a disadvantage, which could have a snowball kind of effect. We need a way of building in forgiveness and compassion into the system so everyone has a chance to earn a good reputation regardless of any mistakes or misunderstandings that have occurred in the past…
But at the same time I presume they would have the opportunity to redeem themselves? I feel there needs to be some kind of appeal process if people feel they have been given an unfair score/rating that is being used against them. We also need a way of verifying that the score is valid and accurate and not made up to promote themselves or business and to disadvantage their competitor, etc…
Saying that, I am a big fan of this and feel it is the future and is why we will be using this for the Karma system in the OASIS API system for Our World…
Can you please expand on the relative reputation score (context) as well as staking? Thank you.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you can leverage reputation systems to accelerate interactions within your app. P2P environments may not have the benefit of centralised algorithms to drive user engagement, but by enabling users to ‘import’ contexts from other apps, you can spark off new kinds of interactions.
Think of each application as a social setting. Traditionally a user entering the environment starts from a sanitised blank slate, forced to re-engage with strangers. But through the reputation economy they can import multiple layers of contexts. The user effectively engages with prior relationships as opposed to depending entirely on the centralised algorithm for the next article, interaction, swipe or conversation in the application.
For example, a user who has existing relationships in a sharing economy app, could leverage this to accelerate interactions in other applications like social media, micro-blogging or even other allied sharing economy apps.
Reputation Labs helps you understand basic principles of Reputation, design it for your application and empower your users to port it across systems for highly engaged experience!
A reputation can be built from objective, measurable data points (e.g. money transferred in time) or subjective information (the Uber car was too cold).
Have you thought of ways to control for such subjectivity?
In addition, different social, legal, and economic environments may result in differences in how reputation is constructed and construed.
Is it economically viable to participate in a reputation-based system? Can you provide successful examples?
Love the ideas shared by Sacred Capital and the deeper questions here? My interest was in know about the macroeconomic picture and how ready are as a whole to move to these new ways of thinking and engaging with each other (via reputation, user-owned data, so on). Whats our sense of the adoption enablers and timeline for early adopters and subsequent folks?
The role of reputation labs is to help entrepreneurs and app developers to think about reputation design. Generally, a well-designed reputation system would have some form of a legacy mechanic (Taking into account previous reputations).
This legacy mechanic would allow consistently high-rated users to reap some benefits, whilst giving lower-rated users a chance to build their reputation back up.
Because user’s have the ability to see how reputation is designed, well-designed reputation systems where forgiveness and fairness are prevalent, should garner more users than those with badly designed reputations.
Due to the agent centric nature of the reputation interchange, the user has the power to navigate through the new economy in their own terms. This gives the user agency on where they choose to stake their reputations, letting them decide whether a score is fair or valid.
If a user wants to participate in an ecosystem that calculates reputation in a way that they don’t necessarily agree with, they could choose not to stake any external reputation into said ecosystem. This, however, would eliminate a large amount of the network effects gained from participating in the interchange.
Essentially, our system is designed to give the user’s agency over their own reputational wealth.
Does being agent centric also mean that reputation scores are not objectively true, but clearly originating from specific agents doing the rating? e.g., if someone has a habit of giving unfair scores, then collectively we should be able to see that ratings from this person are less reliable than others.
Yes. Each application or ecosystem has the freedom to articulate or design their reputation to fit their specific needs.
Great questions. Will address the three parts separately.
Reputation staking is one of the principles of the Reputation economy - Since it’s non-zero sum, it can’t be spent, but can be staked.
In the agent centric environment, when you ‘stake reputation’ in implies you are willing to place at stake an activity in one app/eco-system to provide more context to another.
This is initiated by the app creators, who ‘propose’ a stake, and completed when you, the user ‘consents’. This consent essentially allows you to import context into this new application. This means you’re not engaging in the new application in a sterile manner, as a stranger - but with a rich social backdrop (check some of the other examples share above). If you believe past reputation isn’t relevant in this application, you can choose to not consent.
In the first phase of our rollout our focus is on building a common foundation that can be shared by applications. We’re exploring conversations with the Holo team to release a set of standards and frameworks for data structures and Zomes that will be used by all apps for Reputation computations. Once this is in place, we’ll shift to Phase 2. This involves providing users a ‘dashboard to navigate the new economy’. Think of it as a control panel through which you can build and harness your reputation wealth to modulate your engagements in the new economy. The attached image should offer some insights.
Regarding the business model - we haven’t made it public yet - stay tuned - details will be announced in the coming months
