Quote from: shorena on May 11, 2015, 07:38:36 PM

Quote from: tspacepilot on May 11, 2015, 05:44:47 PM

-snip-
Indeed, and this is basically what Shorena argues above. That because we can buy-and-sell accounts then of course we can buy-and-sell trusted accounts. But I hope it's become quite clear that this makes the trust system effectively a system in which we can buy and sell trust.

Just to make this clear. It does - at least to me - but I dont have a solution.

Quote from: tspacepilot on May 11, 2015, 05:44:47 PM

I think that's what the OP was driving at, and I think it's a well-reasoned point. I'm not sure how/why buying and selling trust isn't just as "okay" as buying and selling accounts. As far as I can tell, it's effectively the same thing.

As it was argued by SaltySpitoon, the difference is that one (selling account) is commonly accepted by the community while the other is not (selling trust directly).

Quote from: tspacepilot on May 11, 2015, 05:44:47 PM

@Shorena in re whether or not default trust accounts are bought and sold. You may be right that it doesn't happen often, but how would we really know? I don't understand what you mean about "there'd be no incentive", it seems to me that if you have a default trust account and you have a buyer willing to pay a lot for it, the incentive is there, whether or not the two people reach a deal is some sort of empirical matter.

Yes, exactly. Lets just assume that I want to cash out big time here. I would probably start with spamming up to the max number of posts I can get payment for, Bit-X is currently not limiting the number of post I think. I might even be possible to convince marco to offer me a special deal and get paid in advance. I do write constructive posts, that is somewhat established. The next step would be to take a loan without collateral and just offer my credibility, which would probably not be worth much, but a least a bit. Finally selling the account at the same time or shortly afterwards secretly on another board (hackerboard maybe?). The sale would ofc include the private keys to addresses I posted in the past to make sure the new owner can perfectly argue (with signed message) that they are still the same person and that the loan was done by a hacker. Considering that the loaned amount would not be much, they would probably curse a bit and just repay it to stay on DefaultTrust. I should probably add my PGP key to convince Quickseller and others as well as every message I every received encrypted by them. A complete all around shorena sell out, mail, (empty) wallet, PGP key, german lessons, everything included.

I have next to no incentive to tell BadBear that I am about to sell the account and it should be removed from DefaultTrust. In fact I have an incentive to do the opposite. I find this very troubling, same as our trolling friend. I do not think that banning the sale of accounts in general is a valid option though. In the above scenario it would not make a difference whether selling the account would be allowed or not.

To make this perfectly clear: I have no plans to do what I described above. Its just a thought experiment.

Just to let you know, most of the time a condition of a sale is going to include a provision that the account does not have any outstanding loans or obligations. Any halfway decent escrow will check for this even if this isn't the case. If you were to try to sell your account with an outstanding loan would probably lead you to get negative trust and the sale would probably fall through.

You are right that you do have an incentive to not get any positive trust removed and an incentive to try to remain on default trust if you were to sell your account. The reason for this is that both will add value to your account. I would say with a good amount of certainty that a scammer could probably not scam for more then the value of your account. Yes you have the possibility to do a number of small scams in private however there is the risk that one person will be suspicious of you and will call scam then others who you are in the process of trying to scam will corroborate your scam attempts and the value of your account will plummet.

Sure there are instances where people will sell their accounts plus their private keys however trying to scam with a trusted account is a gamble at best and a gamble with small potential rewards and high risk and a generally small success rate. I would call the EV of buying a trusted and/or a default trust account to be negative by a long stretch.