Reputation + Interpretation = Rating
Many times we at PAKET are encountered with the questions:
— “so, does your courier have some sort of rating?”
Since we are creating a global decentralized package delivery network, where anyone can potentially deliver any package, the question of how to ensure the safety of your delivery is clear.
However, the answer is a bit surprising:
Rating is not a decentralized concept.
Consider the following two couriers:
- Alice: delivered 500 packages in the quarter, and lost only 2 of them.
- Bob: delivered 10 packages last week, with 0 lost packages.
Which courier should you trust? Would you prefer Bob, who successfully delivered all 100% of his packages, over Alice, who delivered 99.6% of her packages? Would you prefer Alice, as she has been delivering packages for a while and has 50 times more packages on her record?? What if I told you Bob has ★★★★☆ rating, and Alice has ★★★☆☆?
There is no single answer to this. What is entirely obvious and anyone can agree on, is the reputation of both. How anyone, including any algorithm anyone codes, interpret this reputation is different. The interpretation is entirely subjective.
For this reason, we claim that Ranking, or Rating, is not a decentralized concept, and in the PAKET protocol we don’t have Rating, just Reputation. Anyone can view any courier’s reputation by looking at the public ledger.
That’s why we claim that rating is a reputation plus interpretation.
So, no rating?
We actually do have rating! But it’s important to note that it’s a 3rd Layer attribute (the application layer) and not a 1st Layer attribute (the decentralized protocol). As you may recall, the 1st Layer is the decentralized layer, implementing the trust…. The 3rd Layer is where different applications with different implementations provide additional benefits to the user.
So, one implementation may decide to rate couriers according to their reputation, another based on user provided feedback, and a third might opt to not offer rating at all, just show hard numbers of successful and failed deliveries.
It’s worth mentioning that the primary utility of Layer 1 is to ensure safe delivery of a package by providing that each courier carrying a package is committed to a safe delivery by staking collateral, and it’s provable in the ledger. That’s a key in ensuring that the delivery is a commodity. We’ll explore this in a future post.
