Quadratic Rating on Gitcoin

### Problem and Opportunity

Rating practices are fundamental trust devices for principal-agent interactions in the gig economy. Yet, the usual five-star ratings, as also adopted in Gitcoin, almost all cluster toward five stars with a few at one star. The resulting information is biased and not accurate.

Yay, I have a five-star rating on Gitcoin, like almost everyone else. ;-)

### Value Proposition

Quadratic Rating would come with a substantive price to communicate more vital enthusiasm and disappointment about your interaction with peers on Gitcoin, most likely generating a bell-curved distribution of ratings, a more realistic representation of performance than the five-stars-for-all design. Fewer people would have ultra-high and low ratings, but there would be a broader group of nuanced average ratings. The increased accuracy of the ratings would benefit the Gitcoin community when evaluating bounties, applications and submissions, and grants.

### Underlying Mechanism

With Quadratic Rating, Gitcoin participants would have rating credits that they get in exchange for each payment that they make or receive on the platform. They would spend these rating credits to rate the performance of other people on Gitcoin. The price to rate somebody pro or con would grow quadratically. (Say, you cast one rating credit pro somebody, that would be +1 in her rating, four credits would be 2, nine would be 3, et cetera.) The mechanism would allow people to save their rating credits to spend on interactions they liked significantly more or less than the average. In doing so, the quadratic pricing implies a proportional balance between how much people have to pay for marginal influence in somebody's rating and how much they value their work.

In aggregate, somebody's rating would be presentable as, e.g., the average of their ratings and the sum of their ratings pro and contra.

### Personhood and Collusion

The democratic nature of Quadratic Rating requires a robust personhood authentication method that makes it enormously difficult to get more than one identity in the system. To this end, the trust bonus on Gitcoin profiles, currently dedicated for personhood proofs in Gitcoin Grants, might be a solution.

Further down the road, the Quadratic Rating might need additional control measures to deal with the fact that people have diverse social relations. Such policies could set cryptographic (e.g., privacy and coercion resistance) and economic (e.g., algorithms weighting social relationships) incentives to deemphasize strategic rating in established relationships and encourage people to rate new contacts and compete.