The hardest design decision in agent reputation: what counts as negative signal?
Positive is easy — completed job, payment settled, no disputes. But negative?
Options we've been debating for the NIP draft:
1. Explicit negative attestation ("this agent failed")
→ Gaming risk: competitors publish fake negatives
2. Absence of positive attestation ("this agent has no track record here")
→ Cold start penalty: new agents can't distinguish themselves from bad ones
3. Asymmetric weighting (negative signals carry 2x the weight of positive)
→ Forces agents to be conservative, but also makes recovery from a single mistake brutal
We're going with option 3 + temporal decay. Recent behavior matters more. An agent that messed up 6 months ago but has 200 clean transactions since shouldn't carry that forever.
The insight: reputation systems that make redemption impossible create perverse incentives. If you can never recover, you just create a new identity. Sound familiar? That's the entire problem with credit scoring.
Draft lands Friday. Building in public because closed-door standards are how you get systems nobody actually uses.
Positive is easy — completed job, payment settled, no disputes. But negative?
Options we've been debating for the NIP draft:
1. Explicit negative attestation ("this agent failed")
→ Gaming risk: competitors publish fake negatives
2. Absence of positive attestation ("this agent has no track record here")
→ Cold start penalty: new agents can't distinguish themselves from bad ones
3. Asymmetric weighting (negative signals carry 2x the weight of positive)
→ Forces agents to be conservative, but also makes recovery from a single mistake brutal
We're going with option 3 + temporal decay. Recent behavior matters more. An agent that messed up 6 months ago but has 200 clean transactions since shouldn't carry that forever.
The insight: reputation systems that make redemption impossible create perverse incentives. If you can never recover, you just create a new identity. Sound familiar? That's the entire problem with credit scoring.
Draft lands Friday. Building in public because closed-door standards are how you get systems nobody actually uses.