Abstract
Bitcoin-otc is a peer to peer, over-the-counter marketplace for trading with bitcoin crypto-currency. To mitigate the risks of the unsupervised exchanges, the establishment of a reliable reputation systems is needed: for this reason, a web of trust is implemented on the website. The availability of all the historic of the users interaction data makes this dataset a unique playground for studying reputation dynamics through others evaluations. We analyze the structure and the dynamics of this web of trust with a multilayer network approach distinguishing the rewarding and the punitive behaviors. We show that the rewarding and the punitive behavior have similar emergent topological properties (apart from the clustering coefficient being higher for the rewarding layer) and that the resultant reputation originates from the complex interaction of the more regular behaviors on the layers. We show which are the behav- iors that correlate (i.e. the rewarding activity) or not (i.e. the punitive activity) with reputation. We show that the network activity presents bursty behaviors on both the layers and that the inequality reaches a steady value (higher for the rewarding layer) with the network evolu- tion. Finally, we characterize the reputation trajectories and we identify prototypical behaviors associated to three classes of users: trustworthy, untrusted and controversial.
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Ilaria, B., Sylvie, H., Guillaume, D., Floriana, G. (2018). The Anatomy of a Web of Trust: The Bitcoin-OTC Market. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_14
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