The point was that your claim that it wasn't a "rating" goes against the very name and method. You are in fact "rating" people, and my original statement about being able to rate people at will with absolutely no transaction related to the rating or reasoning behind it were correct. If we have a transaction together and you send me an item, I send you money, and everythign is fine BUT I don't like your avatar on the forums, I can rate you -10 just for shits and giggles, and guess what-- it works, it's permanent, and there is no way for me to refute it. -That- is why I think the system is a joke until it's fixed. If you care to comment on -that-, please do. Posting quotes from the website only proved my point.
You rate how much you
trust the other person.
So say, I don't trust you because you are named Matthew, and hence rate you -10. This is no problem, because it only means
I don't trust you.
Look at this example:
http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=MetabankSomeone rated him -5 for whatever reason. Would you still trust him? Most probably, because a single bad trust rating means nothing, if there are other trust ratings. Quite the same as one customer complaining, while there are a lot of happy customers.
And as soon as you realize that this is a trust rating and not some beauty contest, you look at all the individual trust ratings before doing a trade. Sometimes you even look one step further, you look at all the trust ratings of the raters.
That is how it works and why it works. And if I want to state that I don't trust you, then, yes, I don't want you to be able to remove it. You can behave to gain my trust, and then I can change my trust rating. Probably you don't know, but one can change a trust rating anytime.
