Editing Reputation (section)

== REP design analysis ==
Labeling a digital token to be a REP token does not automatically mean it serves the practical function of genuine reputation. The REP Token Minting Mechanism, the REP Salary Mechanism, and the REP Review Mechanism engender the following eight essential qualities for REP tokens which partly characterize the traditional concept of reputation.

=== Qualities of meaningful REP ===

==== ''1. Future orientation'' ====
The REP salary guarantees reputation tokens continue to pay off in the future, whenever anyone from the platform earns fees. This focuses members’ goals toward future productivity, instead of immediate rewards, which incentivizes cooperation. This gives us a signal predicting that a member with high REP will likely continue to behave well in the future.

==== ''2. Solidarity'' ====
By sharing the fees with the group (REP salary), the design encourages solidarity. Members are not merely incentivized to maximize their personal token holdings, but also to protect the group value of all reputation tokens. The ideal individual strategy is to act so that the group will continue to earn future business to maximize the REP salary.

==== ''3. Decentralization'' ====
''Main page: [[Decentralization]]''

This mechanism is [[wikipedia:Monetary_inflation|inflationary]], in the economic sense, since new tokens are continually added to the DAO through the REP minting mechanism, whenever the DAO earns profit.<ref>It is a security risk for a DAO to print tokens in proportion to revenue instead of profit, since an entity which provides the service is then advantaged over members purely devoted to the DAO’s restricted domain of expertise.</ref> This naturally decentralizes power as the total quantity of REP tokens inflates<ref>The more advanced option of giving REP tokens a finite lifetime, as discussed in [[Reputation tokenomics|REP tokenomics]], is therefore a threat to decentralization whenever REP expires. Nevertheless, finite lifetimes encourage new membership, which can also have a decentralizing effect.</ref>, since any new work from any source will dilute the existing power base.

==== ''4. Meritocracy'' ====
The system is entirely meritocratic, since all fees the group earns are distributed to members proportionally to their individual REP token holdings (REP salary), which are earned only when a member contributes something valuable to the DAO (REP Minting Mechanism).

==== ''5. Grounding'' ====
To guarantee reputation is '''grounded''' in meaning, the only time a REP token is minted is when the DAO gains money from outside the organization, when fees are paid for work done by members (REP Minting Mechanism). Fungible cash money is thus seen as a mediator of value between different DAO’s REP types, and is a representative of universal energy. 

This grounding of value in money distributed to the whole DAO through the REP salary, combined with the validation provided by the weighted-democratic review of the Validation Pool mechanism, gives observers of the process confidence in the individual member of the DAO who earned the REP tokens, which promotes trust in all REP in the DAO, which encourages business transactions with the DAO.

==== ''6. Limited Domain'' ====
Different types of work should be given different types of REP tokens. Reputation should represent the history of positive contributions for a specific skill. Every DAO will necessarily entail a complex combination of different expertises. To be able to appropriately and efficiently reward members for their contributions, to allow proper decentralized policing of reputation, multiple incompatible types of REP tokens are needed, one for each expertise the DAO requires to function. 

For example, every DAO will need help developing the software they use, so devREP is needed that is not interchangeable with the main workREP. A second example every DAO will need is govREP which controls the decisions the DAO makes for how to change the [[wikipedia:Smart_contract|smart contracts]] they use in response to changes in the market. Basic workREP, devREP, and govREP each represent non-overlapping expertises. Therefore the tokens for tracking and auditing members’ relative power should also be distinguished. Separate types of tokens are incompatible, in the sense that owning one type of token gives you none of the rights or powers that any other type enjoys. How each type of REP is rewarded in a DAO requires continual negotiation between different DAOs' govREP holders.

Separate types of REP are tracked by the REP Minting Mechanism through the Validation Pool.

We can think of these separate types of REP as making the colloquial social concept of reputation into a vector. Each type of REP token is a different component in the social vector that is ''reputation''. 

For example, a 3-D vector is just a triple of numbers [7, 40, 11]. Each of the scalar numbers  7, 40, & 11, are components in the vector. A person who belongs to 3 DAOs has a wallet with 3 REP types. Their wallet is a dynamic vector which changes the amounts of REP that the person holds in the various DAOs they belong to. 

==== ''7. Non-fungibility'' ====
The delay in payouts of REP salary allows the group to slash any member’s REP holdings if it is discovered the actions which earned any specific REP token were harmful to the DAO before the individual recoups the fee earned for the work. Thus each token is different from every other, since it is associated with a particular action, the particular instantiation of the WSC.

==== ''8. Review'' ====
The future orientation and non-fungibility is magnified when combined with a mechanism for slashing or augmenting reputation tokens. REP is reviewable. By giving a DAO the power to review of each separate action that earned REP in the past, tokens earned from a specific action are not interchangeable with any other token. (See ''Main article: [[Judicial governance]]''.)