[fubu]

I'm not that aware of how Silk Road 2.0 works, but with all the anonymity involved, would it be very difficult for a seller to complete transactions to herself with dummy accounts to pump up their ratings? This was very common in the Amazon and Ebay world when I was around those several years ago.

[gwern]

It would not. Of course, they still have to pay the SR2 commission on all the turnover. There have been a lot of complaints on the SR2 forums over the past year that a lot of feedback is untrustworthy compared to SR1, among many other complaints about the poor operator performance.

[Semaphor]

I don't know first hand, but several articles about SR (2.0? 1.5? no clue) said that the admins are very good at weeding out fake reviews. Though it wasn't mentioned how they do it.