Receipts, not reviews
Ask anyone who runs a bike shop what they think of online reviews and you’ll get a sigh. The five stars came from a cousin. The one star came from someone who never walked in.
Now add assistants. An agent can write a hundred convincing reviews before lunch, and another agent can reply to all of them by the afternoon. If a reputation rests on what people say, it’s about to get a lot noisier.
So we started with the thing that actually happened.
What a receipt is
When a booking is confirmed or an order is paid, Surfing Dog Inbox signs a receipt. It’s a short note that says which business made the promise and when. If there’s a price, the amount goes on it too. The inbox publishes its public key, so anyone can check the signature.
The customer’s agent can then counter-sign it. After that, both sides hold the same proof and neither can quietly change it.
A receipt is deliberately dull. It has no names, no email addresses, no messages and no list of what was ordered. The customer shows up as a code the network can’t turn back into a person, and the same customer gets a different code at the next business.
Say a customer’s assistant books a Saturday service at a bike shop. The shop confirms it and its inbox signs a receipt. If the shop has switched on the network, the receipt goes there too and is counted on its listing. That part works today.
Nobody gets a receipt from a café they only walked past. A star costs nothing to give, which is roughly what most of them are worth.
What comes next
We’re building reputation on top of receipts now. A promise will count once it’s kept, when the bike actually gets serviced or the bread actually gets collected. A broken one will count too. A small bakery that has kept all twenty of its orders should rank above a big one that lets one in ten slip.
Customers make promises as well, mostly the promise to turn up. A customer who does will build a record that goes with them whichever assistant they use. A business will only see it when the customer’s agent shows it, and each business will reward it in its own way, such as no deposit or instant confirmation.
The rules are already published and in force. Until records build up, businesses whose inbox is online come first and the rest are shuffled once a day. Nobody can buy a place, now or later.
The receipt format is open under MIT, and anyone can launch a network. A trade body could run one. So could a town. Once our ranking rules are out, they can use them or write their own.