OpenBazaar model may be good enough or not good enough. Hard to tell. Fraud prevention may work with help of 3rd party arbiters, but 3rd party may not be 3rd pa

OpenBazaar model may be good enough or not good enough. Hard to tell. Fraud prevention may work with help of 3rd party arbiters, but 3rd party may not be 3rd party at all. And it's not even that hard to set up. Situation where seller and buyer have two distinct sets of trusted arbiters is also easy to imagine. There is a much more interesting solution for this problem. No third party needed. Two parties, game theory and one established fact about human psychology could be enough. Idea is following - if any of parties can't possibly gain anything from fraud in the long run, there will be no fraud. To achieve that, buyer freezes two prices of the item, seller freezes one price of the item. Money is frozen atomically, and is defrosted atomically. Money is freed only if both parties are happy. Some studies indicate that people have very strong feelings about justice IF they are dealing with strangers. This should cause strong revulsion of any unjust solution (e.g. buyer caving in just to unfreeze some of frozen money). To prevent such blackmail and other forms of psychological manipulation, both parties are anonymous by default and can't communicate using this software. Project is called Bitmarkets [1], it's published on MIT license and it's amazing. Read about it. [1] https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/ https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/