Tangentially, is it possible for a good reputation metric to survive attacks in real life?
Imagine that you become e.g. a famous computer programmer. But although you are a celebrity among free software people, you fail to convert this fame to money. So must keep a day job at a computer company which produces shitty software.
One day your boss will realize that you have high prestige in the given metric, and the company has low prestige. So the boss will ask you to "recommend" the company on your social network page (which would increase the company prestige and hopefully increase the profit; might decrease your prestige as a side effect). Maybe this would be illegal, but let's suppose it isn't, or that you are not in a position to refuse. Or you could imagine a more dramatic situation: you are a widely respected political or economical expert, it is 12 hours before election, and a political party has kidnapped your family and threatens to kill them unless you "recommend" this party, which according to their model would help them win the election.
In other words, even a digital system that works well could be vulnerable to attacks from outside of the system, where otherwise trustworthy people are forced to act against their will. A possible defense would be if people could somehow hide their votes; e.g. your boss might know that you have high prestige and the company has low prestige, but has no methods to verify whether you have "recommended" the company or not (so you could just lie that you did). But if we make everything secret, is there a way to verify whether the system is really working as described? (The owner of the system could just add 9000 trust points to his favorite political party and no one would ever find out.)
I suspect this is all confused and I am asking a wrong question. So feel free to answer to question I should have asked.
There are simultaneously a large number of laws prohibiting employers from retaliating against persons for voting, and a number of accusations of retaliation for voting. So this isn't a theoretical issue. I'm not sure it's distinct from other methods of compromising trusted users -- the effects are similar whether the compromised node was beaten with a wrench, got brain-eaten, or just trusted Microsoft with their Certificates -- but it's a good demonstration that you simply can't trust any node inside a network.
(There's some interesting overlap with MIRI...
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