Wouldn’t it be great if you could trust online reviews? Oh, you thought you could? Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but the truth is that there are too many manipulated or forged reviews mixed in with the real ones to be able to say with any certainty what’s real and what’s not.

Vendors have gotten used to writing their own positive reviews, writing negative reviews for competitors or simply deleting the ones that don’t serve their interests. We’ve all heard a lot lately of how important free press is to maintaining a modern democracy; aren’t honest and unaltered reviews just as important to maintaining a market that benefits both businesses and consumers?

If the bad news is that online reviews can’t be trusted these days, the good news is that YINC is fixing this issue. YINC is an online platform that connects consumers with service providers in just about every field imaginable. YINC has innovated in a number of areas to create a level playing field between businesses and consumers, but perhaps its most important feature is an unalterable history of transactions and completed jobs alongside a fool-proof, tamper-free review system that vendors cannot game.

This is made possible by the power of blockchain technology. Distributing all of the information regarding a transaction and the resulting reviews in a decentralized manner creates a permanent, unalterable history of each business’ and customer’s activity for all to see.

Having such a reliable, detailed account of past transactions brings several benefits to the table.

Let’s say you go to buy a new house and the current owner wants to tack on several thousand dollars because of recent repairs and restorations. If the contractors for that job were hired through YINC, you could go and view that history, verifying that the work was indeed recent and worth what the owner is asking for.

It also makes reviews unalterable, solving the problem of review deletion that is so rampant online today. But we have to be careful, because blockchain decentralization doesn’t in-and-of-itself dissolve the threat of fake reviews. In fact, If vendors can still game the system and hire themselves, you’ll just be left with blockchain protected fake reviews, which is even worse!

YINC reviews are tied to completed transactions and linked to the blockchain, but what if a vendor could simply hire himself? Once he completes the transaction and pays for his own “services” he would then be free to write a glowing review of himself that could never be removed.

So, YINC has developed some innovative ways to bypass and suppress fake reviews. YINC’s solution lies in the algorithm that chooses which companies get to bid on a project. Once a customer creates a lead on YINC, detailing what services he needs, this algorithm kicks into gear, randomly inviting vendors based on parameters like location, category of service, reviews and their previous response times (which also incentives businesses to treat customers well). The consumer can then chat and negotiate with the vendors who respond, but they have no control of which vendors are invited to bid. So vendors cannot simply act as a consumer and try to hire themselves to leave blockchain protected fake reviews, because they won’t be able to choose themselves to begin with!

And vendors will not be able to leave negative reviews for their competitors either, because you can only leave a rating once you actually pay for the job, and, both the consumer and the vendor must confirm the job was completed in order to leave a review.

So while blockchain on its own doesn’t solve the problem, YINC’s unique review process and integration of the blockchain, changes the game and seals the deal for review fraud and manipulation. All that’s left is honesty, transparency and the natural flow of a fair services industry.