The crypto-currency known as Bitcoin was first introduced in 2009 in a paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto. As Kaspersky Lab described the e-currency:
The bitcoin price has been on a tear recently, more than doubling to about $2,900 over the last three months. (It didn't hurt that Sunday, the popular Tim Ferriss podcast released a two-and-a-half-hour episode on the subject.)
If bitcoin were performing and executing on all cylinders two years ago and meeting the demands of all its constituents, would we have these other coins at all? Bitcoin had all the market share. Today it doesn’t.”
It has been shown that seller ratings given by previous buyers give new customers useful information when making purchasing decisions. Bitcoin,however, is designed to obfuscate the link between buyer and seller with a layer of limited anonymity, thus preventing buyers from finding or validating this information. While this level of anonymity is valued by the Bitcoin community, as Bitcoin moves toward greater adoption there will be pressure from buyers who wish to know more about who they are doing business with, and sellers who consider their reputation a strong selling point, to allow greater transparency. We consider three different models by which a reputation/rating system could be implemented in conjunction with Bitcoin transactions and consider pros and cons of each. We find that each presents challenges on both
the technological and social fronts.