Bartering Reputations & the Trusted Stranger

Building Trust Online

One of the important things to consider when meeting strangers over the Internet is whether they are a genuine person you can trust, or whether they are a faker, a scammer or a spammer. Websites overcome this problem by providing the facility for users to build their reputations through their actions on the website and interactions with other members.

Building Trust with Favabank

Favabank provides a number of mechanisms whereby members can reassure one another of their trustworthiness as explained in the following video:

As shown in the video, there are 3 main ways to build your Bartering Reputation.

1. Vouching for one another's authenticity
2. Balancing your Favabank account
3. Giving and receiving feedbacks

Vouching for One Another's Authenticity

On Favabank, you can 'connect' with friends in a similar way to other Social Networks by adding existing members as 'friends' or inviting friends who aren't already registered. When inviting or adding a friend, or accepting an invitation from someone else, you have the option of vouching for their authenticity... You are advised to only vouch for the authenticity of people that you know and trust personally and would be happy to recommend to others.

Looking at the friends & neighbours a member is connected with and how many of those have vouched for their authenticity should give you an initial indication of their trustworthiness.

Balancing Your Favabank Account

You can use Favabank to both give and receive things from other people by using our virtual currency, the Fava, rather than using cash.

Favabank is an open system so that people's trading histories can be viewed by other members. People are free to go into debt on Favabank, after all that is a requirement for units of currency to be created. While there is no pressure to give back as much as you receive from the system, you may find that people are more likely to trade with you if you have reciprocated the favours you have received. When trading with someone you are free to review their account, and chose to only trade with those who have given as well as taken from the system if you wish.

Giving and Receiving Feedbacks

After completing a trade, the recipient of whatever was traded is required to confirm the trade as completed within their Favabank account in order for the payment in Favas to be made. When a trade is confirmed as completed, both members have the opportunity to provide feedback if they wish. Building positive feedbacks from your transactions is another way to build your bartering reputation.

The Trusted Stranger

So through Vouching for friends, Managing your account and giving and receiving feedbacks, your are building your bartering reputation and becoming a trusted stranger that people are more likely to want to trade with in the future. Using this approach, we hope to build a whole network of trusted strangers...

In addition to your bartering reputation you can build trust by uploading your photograph and profile information, as well as contributing to the 'Social' section of the website, which includes the facility to geographically index a post, which can be shown as relevant only to your Street, Your town, or your county...

A Huge Chain of IOUs

Conventional Money such as the UK Pound is really just a huge system of credit, and our notes represent a 'Promise to pay'. It is our collective faith in the reputation of financial institutions in keeping the 'promise to pay' which maintains the value of our notes and coins.

By building our bartering reputations, the Favabank system can become a huge chain of IOUs backed buy our own personal 'promises to pay' and this will ultimately be the key to giving the Fava its value...