Reputation and Bonding on Mesh

[buck54321]

Hey all, I've been attacking reputation from a few different angles, but I haven't really found the right fit yet. Since others have expressed interest in this subject, I thought I'd open it up for discussion.

@dev-warrior777 shared this paper regarding a decentralized reputation system that does a good job of laying out the challenges we face. It's worth a read.

Features of the reputation system that I'm certain about.

• There are two level of reputation.
  • Clients track reputation data for all other clients that the interact with. We'll just call this Reputation.
  • Tatanka Mesh nodes will aggregate Reputation data reported from clients. We'll call this AggregateReputation.
• The number of Reputation reports considered as part of the AggregateReputation will be limited. Maybe 100 or so most recent.
• Users will low or no AggregateReputation will require a bond in order to use Mesh.
• When trading, the amount a client is willing to match with a counterparty will be limited by the counterparty's AggregateReputation. This is analogous to the trading limits in the v0 dex protocol.

Features that I'm feeling good about.

• The range of possible Reputation that clients report to Mesh will be will be small. I'm thinking [-127, 127].
• The possible effects of a given single interaction on a counterparty's Reputation score will be fairly limited. For positive interactions,
  the only effect would be a +1. For negative interactions, the effect could be larger, and would of course be negative.
• Users with an AggregateReputation score above a certain critical reputation score will no longer require a bond to use Mesh. Should their score drop below that level, they would be required to bond back up though. Once a user surpasses the critical reputation score, they can refund their bond without delay.
• Bonds will be instantly refundable after their maturation period. Once a user

Features I'm considering

• More recent interactions could be weighted more heavily in the Reputation score
• There could be a couple of different interaction types, with some types more persistent than others. This is analogous to how different types of interactions have different depths in v0 dex. (See matchOutcomes, preimageOutcomes, orderOutcomes in auth.go)
• There could be a sort of recursiveness built in such that a negative interaction would have a larger effect for counterparties with higher reputation. This might mitigate the ability of a user to game the system by building their reputation up so that they can do some maliciousness, rinse, repeat, while still preventing an unfortunate occurrence like a network outage from completely decimating a counterparty's score beyond the point of no return.
• Users with high AggregateReputation could hand out a limited number of voucher bonds to onboard other users. These would act the same as regular bonds, but would require no actual funds.