Digital arbitration for trusted communication

We introduce the notion of digital-arbitration which enables resolving disputes between servers and users with the aid of arbitrators. Arbitrators are semi-trusted entities in the social network that facilitate communication or business transactions. The communicating parties, users and servers, agree before a communication transaction on a set of arbitrators they trust (reputation systems may support their choice). Then, the arbitrators receive a resource, e.g., a deposit, and a terms-of-use agreement between participants such that the resource of a participant is returned if and only if the participant acts according to the agreement.We demonstrate the usage of arbitrators in the scope of conditional anonymity. A user interacts anonymously with a server as long as the terms for anonymous communication are honored. If a server identifies a violation of the terms, it proves to the arbitrators that a violation took place and the arbitrators publish the identity of the user.

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