Yeah that's gonna be pretty hard to enforce, particularly since you are talking about people that you will probably never actually meet in person.

Also you can search for UABB to find some previous discussions about problems with trust. Not to say it wouldn't work, but it'd be difficult to do.

HATE the BBB

Like your idea. 

I think crowd sourcing credibility is best.  But what is the mechanism?  Votes.  A stack exchange system?

Also any rating system is not full proof.

How many people would have given Bitcoinica the thumbs down the day before the first Hack?

Who saw mybitcoin coming?

Was TradeHill solvent before the Dwolla reversals.

Is Mt. Gox insolvent now and are they practicing fractional reserve?

Lots of questions.  No way to really prove any factual answers.

TRUST is key.

Maybe a web of trust.

Do we trust Gavin Andreesen.  Who does he trust.  Mount Gox.  Bit Instant.  And who do they trust.

Intersango???   Who still trusts PhanotmCircuit and gentix?

Zhoutong?  He still has stanch supporters.  Although they all may be the same person.  An that person is probably into My Little Pony Porn.

I think for the time being the easier goal would be to ferret out the weasels and the scammers.  And let those trusted entities who build reputation  rise to the top.  But then do they become Goldman Sachs,   Long Point Capital, MF Global?  Are any of them run by Bernie Madoff.

Bitcoin is transformation.  We'll figure it out as we go along.

just make it a user review website, like ciao, dooyoo, etc. That way ratings are difficult to fake, (nearly) no trust needed because 100 different people rate a single business and its hard to corrupt AND you dont have to do anything besides keep the site running and kick trolls out.

BBB is EVIL. If one is BBB acredited then that company is ALWAYS RIGHT.

Fuck that.

Lets come up with something with standards that we NEED not copy off of something else!

You could go with the model of Angie's List where the consumer pays to find out the rating of different companies.

Why shoehorn another "legacy app" into the world of bitcoin?

If this is serious then what it needs is something entirely new, like volunteers from all over the planet who go to inspect these businesses and make sure they have real paperwork, and real assets, and then they get ratings for doing multiple inspections so they are potentially more trustworthy.

Of course this will all fail as soon as one scam goes down and you start blaming the poor inspector instead of the real theives, so noone will bother participating.