Employee reputations are inherently tied to the concept of Identity or Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Employment Reputation is one of the many verifiable attributes like Name, Age, Credit Score etc. All of these attributes require strict, "permissioned" access privileges. Thus any open, public, "permissionless" ledger may not work. The "nodes" of any distributed ledger are gatekeepers of its data; they follow strict protocols to reach consensus about which submitted data gets in, and which does not. Usually "permissionless" blockchains (like Bitcoin) typically use "proof of work" (PoW) to reach consensus among the nodes, where anyone with a computer can serve as a node by performing the required work (solving a complex cryptographic puzzle before anyone else). These anonymous systems can have groundbreaking advantages for some applications, such as cryptocurrencies. In contrast, a "public permissioned" distributed ledger (not necessarily a blockchain, for technicality) is something that provides public access for identity owners while permitting only known, trusted, vetted entities to serve as nodes. This provides the greater transparency — and higher comfort level — while still not relying on any intermediary or central authority.
- Immutability: Once committed to the distributed ledger, reputation tokens become part of employee's overall identity.
- Security: As a SSI (see above), identity is managed by the "edge" of the p2p network, making it much more safer than a central authority (read about Equifax breach). Digital signature/PKI further strengthens the security.
- Trust: Reputation tokens are verified via consensus.
We can use SSI system built on Ethereum like uPort to store reputation tokens (REPT) as part of employee's secure public profile (IPFS data structure shown in the following picture). Alternatively we can use a "permissioned" ledger such as
Sovrin.