28 ms·

Silk Road 2.0: A concept of a distributed anonymous marketplace

223 points by goshakkk 13y ago

pdenya 13y ago
In SR1 wasn't an additional feature of having the money go through a centralized party that neither party had access to the others BC wallet id? Would doing it this way negatively impact anonymity?
- kcorbitt 13y ago
  Maybe bitcoins could be moved around in an onion-routing scheme similar to Tor. You might be able to see that a particular wallet ended up with the money but it wouldn't necessarily be possible to see where they came from originally.
  - bascule 13y ago
    See Matt Green's Zerocoin concept: http://zerocoin.org/ http://zerocoin.org/
- chapel 13y ago
  That centralized party is a weak link, and in the case of SR, compromised all BC wallet ids that were used as well as the bitcoins stored.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- GigabyteCoin 13y ago
  ZeroCoin is probably the only way a system like this would work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin
gkoberger 13y ago
Don't forget SR1 was shut down due to a forum post that was linked to an anonymous PHP question on Stack Overflow. [1] There's nothing illegal in this repo, sure -- but definitely don't even think of implementing it yourself. Or even use it. [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took-down-the-dread-pirate-roberts/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...
- breadtk 13y ago
  OPSEC, it's hard.
- goshakkk 13y ago
  1. it's just an idea of how to make a decentralized SR. 2. I doubt I'll be able to implement it entirely myself regardless. 3. even if I or someone else does, what is bad about it, exactly? It'll be just software. A set of Ruby/JS files. Everyone would be able to run a node so clearly punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option.
  - SamuelKillin 13y ago
    That's very naive of you.
  - Jgrubb 13y ago
    "punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option" This is dangerously naive. This is exactly what "they" do, if only to brutally discourage anyone else from trying it.
    - doorty 13y ago
      Live free. Don't let "them" scare you into acting out of fear.
      - Jgrubb 13y ago
        I agree with you 100%. I just also think that to claim "oh, I just wrote this software, I can't get in trouble for anything" doesn't take into account either the technological illiteracy of most of the justice system, nor the current environment of what can qualify on the evening news as being a win for the War on Terror.
    - JulianMorrison 13y ago
      Name one example, please. Said example must include: * open source implementation released to the public * author did not directly do anything obviously illegal, or profit by anyone else doing it * overwhelming force under colour of law
dmix 13y ago
Is this similar to Cryptosphere [1]? Federated networks/decentralized hosting seems to be the future for anonymous storage and communication. I'm curious to see what will be the first real world implementation. The black market drug industry always seems to create pioneers of new forms of subversive technology (see narco-subs). [1] https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere
- bascule 13y ago
  Cryptosphere author here. Thanks for the mention! The brochure site probably provides a better overview than the github project page: http://cryptosphere.org http://cryptosphere.org I should also give a shout out to Tahoe-LAFS, which the Cryptosphere is inspired by. They've also discussed supporting distributed webapps and adding a JavaScript API: https://tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org > I'm curious to see what will be the first real world implementation Cryptosphere, Tahoe-LAFS, and similar systems have all sorts of potential use cases. I'd love to see distributed Facebooks, distributed Wikipedias, and even a distributed DNS registry. One of the reasons I'm using Git as the "object manager" in Cryptosphere is to better facilitate things like forking, so if there's a distributed web site you like, and you don't like the way it's being managed, you could fork your own copy and try to get people to use that instead (licenses permitting, of course!)
  - Ixiaus 13y ago
    http://gnunet.org http://gnunet.org deserves a shout-out too I believe.
    - bascule 13y ago
      See also: Freenet, MNet: https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere/wiki/FAQ#q-what-makes-the-cryptosphere-different-from-insert-p2p-system-x-here https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere/wiki/FAQ#q-what...
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > distributed Wikipedias Off topic, but I'm curious what you mean by this. The only thing I can imagine you mean is to have Wikipedia's databases sharded everywhere and... that doesn't really make sense to me.
smoyer 13y ago
Funds were also transferred through SR's wallet so they could take their cut.
- goshakkk 13y ago
  A similar can be implemented with this, too. Basically, when you want to buy something, instead of sending bitcoin manually, the marketplace generates a payment request for you, with two outputs — merchant (the good price) & marketplace (the fee) + some unique ID in the comment field so that the service can link your payment to the order. It can be a QR code or bitcoin:// link or something.
  - smoyer 13y ago
    I didn't say you couldn't do it but please describe how this part of the marketplace is distributed.
    - conductr 13y ago
      Would a distributed marketplace even charge a fee? I would assume all users would be happily compensated by the existence of the marketplace. The lack of fees also increase margins/decreases price
      - pogue 13y ago
        Somebody has to pay to host the thing, run it and so forth.
        Jonovono 13y ago
        Distributed system.
        pogue 13y ago
        Quite right. Still, I think this whole libertarian concept is probably based on the idea of _someone_ making some money somewhere along the lines. :) I assume the mediators would need to be paid, at the bare minimum, probably moderators to filter out junk and spam and whatever other unforeseen circumstances pop up.
kilroy123 13y ago
There were alternatives to SR before the bust, so I imagine one will take its place, and become the biggest. Just like with all large drug enterprises, one falls, another comes in and takes its place. No doubt the other site owners will learn from all this and adapt.
devx 13y ago
Couldn't this work on RetroShare's "forums", too? http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/retroshare-forums/ http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/retroshare-fo...
- FBT 13y ago
  Yep. I fully expect forums like that to become a dominant mode of communication in the near and medium-term future. All it really needs is for someone to make for it a slick and easy to use interface. If I was in a position at the moment to found a startup, this would absolutely be the field I would found it in.
  - atmosx 13y ago
    I don't see any feasible financial model, how will you induce cash flows since you'll need nodes to run the service and these nodes will also be clients? - If I understand correctly that is.
    - FBT 13y ago
      That is a good question. I will first repeat the advice often given to startup founders: Get it working first, find a was to monetize it second. Beyond that, I have had a few thoughts. Yes, I actually agree that this would be a harder endeavour to monetize than most startups, but if it really came to it, you could make a profit. I did not really go deep into these considerations, as (like I said) I don't actually have the resources at the moment to make it a reality, but my main idea was to integrate it somehow with the bitchain. AFter that, there are several ways you can profit. Say, have each post cost a fraction of a bitcoin to propagate it along. It would encourage others to catch the posts and pass them around in the same way bitcoin miners getting bitcoins for mining encourages bitcoin mining. And then I could charge a commision on that. That is one example, of course I would have to way up all the pros and cons of each approach, and of course there is the drawback of any monetization system necessarily introducing some point of centralization, even in a otherwise entirely decentralised system.
pfraze 13y ago
This strikes me as extremely inappropriate. Don't publicly advertise tools for subverting the state. > there are the bad guys with guns ("the state") that can interrupt the operation any moment and try to seize the money This is just childish. There are much worse guys with guns that lack legal and political processes. They generally don't bother us because the state protects citizens. Handle grievances with regulations or criminal code by organizing popular support for policy changes, not by building systems to break the law. Otherwise, expect to be treated as a criminal.
- piratebroadcast 13y ago
  "This is just childish"- I checked out the twitter handle of the author. He's 16.
  - tempeh 13y ago
    Don't marginalize people by their age. That's not an argument.
    - aric 13y ago
      Ageism is never good. However, it perhaps helps to explain his or her mentality. Conflating law with ethics is probably more likely in younger people given the dynamics of authority, or so it seems to me. There's obviously no shortage of people of all ages who are prone to equating [an authority that commands obedience] with [an authority of subjective moral validity]. As any struggle for freedom and liberation movement throughout history will attest, the dynamics of law vs. ethics are often in deep conflict. Time after time, subservient people who "just follow orders" obey cruelty. Heroes resist and are sacrificed. I digress. In the context of the drug war and voluntary interactions among consenting people, [illegal] markets are the logical way to maintain liberation and resistance to [legal] tyranny.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        > Conflating law with ethics is probably more likely in younger people given the dynamics of authority, or so it seems to me. Assuming that somebody progresses through Lawrence Kohlberg's 'stages of moral development' in order as they develop, that seems reasonable. However, the development of this system seems to be evidence that the author does not conflate ethics and the law. Trading drugs is presumably illegal in the authors jurisdiction, yet the author presumably believes themself to be acting ethically in the development of a system that facilitates the trade of drugs. If the author were conflating the law and morality, then he likely would not develop this system because it would facilitate illegal(therefore immoral) behavior. This does not seem to be the case; the author seems to be capable of separating morality and legality.
blahbl4hblah 13y ago
Heres a hint... if the marketplace was just an API that sends and receives data and not a website that sends you the UI including EXECUTABLE code it would be much much harder to subvert... it would also allow other people to build their own UI's around it. websites have some real limitations...
FBT 13y ago
Distributed services are the future, it seems. I predict (rather boldly, so I may be wrong) that the next wave in computer technology will be the move from centralized servers to a distributed framework. I foresee the next Microsoft/Google/Facebook being a company that brings this idea to reality. (Not specifically the Silk Road bit, but the general paradigm of distributed services.)
- pogue 13y ago
  That may be a very accurate prediction. With the rest of the world afraid of using the US's cloud services for fear of NSA monitoring, something is going to crop up to take its place. First it will be some kind of personal usage, like p2p for trading pirated MP3s and eventually someone will start using it for a business, editing spreadsheets and the like. Decentralized and crypto Office being used by Joe Q Public!
mburns 13y ago
That was a long-winded, meandering way to say 1. Transaction scripts in place of 100% human arbitrage. Reasonable feature. 2. hand-wavy name coin reputation thingy. This idea makes no sense. 3. Being federated would be 'neat', despite the example project being abandoned and largely non-functional. Or you could just use Freenet instead of Tor?
- GigabyteCoin 13y ago
  > 2. hand-wavy name coin reputation thingy. This idea makes no sense. Using namecoin to keep track of identities makes perfect sense. That's precisely what it was created to do. See http://dot-bit.org/Use_cases http://dot-bit.org/Use_cases Obviously the reputations would need to be stored somewhere, but using Namecoin to say "this arbitrator is definitely the arbitrator you are trying to use for arbitration" would work perfectly well.
  - VMG 13y ago
    Adding to this, some reputation is already stored in the blockchain. Former sellers on SR can prove to be owners of previously used addresses.
  - mburns 13y ago
    Bitcoin can already do third-party arbitration and Bitcoin addresses (and/or GPG) can already track identity. How does Namecoin help?
    - GigabyteCoin 13y ago
      Namecoin can keep track of the initial date that the particular identity was registered. It can allow for the owner of the identity to quickly update information for everyone to see in the blockchain. It helps a great deal when it comes to keeping track of identities. You can store up to 1kb of data inside a namecoin registration. The above cannot be said of Bitcoin addresses or GPG.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- goshakkk 13y ago
  Mediators will be getting a fee, obviously. No one would work for free. With bitcoin, it's just one more transaction output.
debacle 13y ago
It would be easier to just create a new Silk Road website. This site also fails to cover the laundering aspect of sending/receiving from a DPR wallet.
nazgulnarsil 13y ago
Horribly underspecified. Reputation based third party arbitration is not even close to a solved problem. The bitcoin block chain does provide a new potential tool in making reputation systems more reliable (a distributed repository of public/private key pairs enables you to reliably tie reputation to a persistent transaction history), but there are lots of free parameters in such a scheme that need to be done right. Additionally, with the node idea, the issue is that most people, including drug dealers, don't want to be mirroring lots of illegal content on their boxes. The set of people who can follow simple rules related to posting on forums and mailing items is much much larger than the set of people who can roll a secure node in a network.
- goshakkk 13y ago
  The nodes will not "mirror" content of other nodes, no. The nodes will be just storing their own data + provide a UI for browsing content of that node as well as the content of other nodes. So technically you're not hosting anything illegal even if some other node does.
  - nazgulnarsil 13y ago
    tell that to TPB, I think anyone hosting a node in such a network would be risking having their boxes seized.
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    Freenet gets around this by having the local data store encrypted and invisible to the local user. You may or may not be hosting illegal/terrible things, but you (and more importantly, the bad guys with guns) don't know either.
hosh 13y ago
I want to see this implemented for buying/selling designs for 3D printable things, and other supplies for Makers. I'm talking really basic things like the OSE's tractor designs. Also: is there any way to use these scripts as a form of DRM? The biggest weakness to current DRM schemes is that the validity of a license depends on a trusted party -- the seller, or something like Steam. While such a scheme won't keep people from outright pirating digital goods, I think I would rather trust a p2p DRM scheme than depending on say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble to stay in business.
- vog 13y ago
  > is there any way to use these scripts as a form of DRM? If you aim for consumer friendliness, you shouldn't do DRM in the first place. > I would rather trust a p2p DRM scheme than depending on say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble to stay in business Since DRM is by definition "defective on purpose" (or "defective by design", as some NGOs say), there is no reason to trust any DRM scheme - p2p or centralized.
  - hosh 13y ago
    > If you aim for consumer friendliness, you shouldn't do DRM in the first place. > Since DRM is by definition "defective on purpose" (or "defective by design", as some NGOs say), there is no reason to trust any DRM scheme - p2p or centralized. Those are unexamined assumptions that are driven more by emotion than anything.
    - vog 13y ago
      Indeed, consumer friendliness is mostly about emotions, that is, keeping your users happy. DRM usually makes users annoyed or even angry.
  - hosh 13y ago
    There are good use-cases for DRM, for example: http://pastebin.com/VSjCpYxt http://pastebin.com/VSjCpYxt
    - 13y ago
leishulang 13y ago
someone will make it eventually. and when it's done, it will be more than a github repo.
VMG 13y ago
Tip: hide the concept behind some clever academic sounding buzzwords, do not mention SR or black markets at all.
0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago
A title like Silk Road 2.0 makes me think you want attention more than you want a distributed anonymous marketplace. Why not focus on having a distributed marketplace that also happens to be anonymous instead of focusing on the anonymous aspect so much?
okey 13y ago
Calling this SR2 might not be the best idea, given the intent of the original.
yeukhon 13y ago
Why are we encouraging black market?
ebbv 13y ago
What's up with using github for what amounts to a text post? It makes the link misleading (implying that you actually have some code), and it's not a great use of github anyway.
tlarkworthy 13y ago
One of the features of SR was that the money was laundered on entrance and exit to silk road. So you could not tell whose money went to who (despite the bitcoin ledger being public). This proposal is missing that critical feature.
- pogue 13y ago
  How was that done?* *Hypothetically asking
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Upthread there's a link to an Ars Technica article [1], which has this line: > He even ran a program called a "tumbler" to route incoming Bitcoin payments through a complicated series of dummy transactions, so as to make them infeasible to trace through the public Bitcoin blockchain. [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took-down-the-dread-pirate-roberts/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...
    - tlarkworthy 13y ago
      yes this is the tech
  - seanalltogether 13y ago
    I think what he's saying that because all money went into one account and out of one account, from the outside you couldn't tell who was sending money to who. It means I can pose as both the buyer and the seller, let silk road take a cut, and turn a big block of known bitcoins into small chunks of unknown bitcoins
- orblivion 13y ago
  Wait for zerocoin then.
pogue 13y ago
I see the problem with Silk Road not essentially being with the currency or the network mode itself, those both seem effective and appear to have been functioning properly at the time of its shut down (in so far as we know). I think the main issue is the trying to get physical items from point A to point B without getting intercepted/apprehended. It's all well and good to move digital items without getting noticed, but once you start shipping things you have to used pre-existing structures (ie: USPS, Fedex, et al.) which, if not run by the government, has no issue with giving any and all information to them. How to solve this is more complicated than the other parts, IMO. Secondly, the arbitration through a third party I could see as being corruptible, if that third party is known and has no legal ramification/justification for just acting on their own good recognizance. It's like there needs to be a black market escrow that can't be bribed and won't steal the money. Also, I'd just like to add that there are other potentials for connectivity outside of Tor & I2P. Older networks such as Freenet allow this kind of node hosting without having to "invent the wheel" and use some kind of new way to host a forum -- it probably just needs some oil added to the wheels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
stretchwithme 13y ago
Maybe the first step is creating a github-like platform without an attackable central authority.
frank_boyd 13y ago
RetroShare accepts plugins, so could that be an option? It's open-source, decentralized, public key encrypted communication and very easy to install and use: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
ye 13y ago
Freenet is anonymous, distributed storage and application framework. Do we need to reinvent the wheel? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/
aianus 13y ago
Given that PGP keys were extensively used by vendors on Silk Road, wouldn't it be possible to use Silk Road profile and transaction data (I'm sure there exist some site dumps out there) to bootstrap a web of trust? Then a distributed hash table or similar structure can be used to publish product listings, signed transaction data, and feedback to keep everyone updated on who's to be trusted or not. There would be no explicit escrow but lots of people trusted the feedback history and "Finalized Early" on Silk Road without getting scammed.
TomGullen 13y ago
Oh god, something like this surely you'd want to distance yourself away from Silkroad as much as possible? Call it something else. Don't mention SR.
- d23 13y ago
  I doubt he's gonna make it. I think it was just thrown out there as an idea.
  - ChuckFrank 13y ago
    email me.
tlrobinson 13y ago
The problem really boils down to reputation and trust. If you can create a "portable" reputation that can move among decentralized marketplaces the rest is relatively easy. But that's a very hard problem.
wf 13y ago
This is way way off topic but it has been really bothering me lately: Why do so many people misspell "losing"? In the wrap up of the OP: >The federated distributed marketplace will be much more difficult to shut down. And even in the case of shut down, no one is loosing their money. I have been seeing this everywhere lately and someone even tried to argue with me that I was misspelling it. Why is this such a common screw up? Lose only has one o as does lost. I see no plausible explanation.
- bookface 13y ago
  Sounds to me like you're being intentionally daft. It's pretty easy to see that the /uː/ sound is associated with "oo" way more commonly than "o".
- patrikr 13y ago
  The OP is a 16 year old from Belarus...
- goshakkk 13y ago
  It's one of only a few words that I keep misspelling over and over again. But why post a comment dedicated solely to proper spelling of "lose" and wondering why so many people misspell it? What's the point? If anything, you could submit a PR or just say "hey, there is a typo". (Fixed now.)
ChuckFrank 13y ago
Silk Road be damned! A distributed anonymous marketplace has many real and tangible benefits. By having a robust community escrow mechanism, and by having people deal directly with each other with reputational support, a marketplace like this could unleash a new age of internet commerce. Add to this several arbitrage mechanism to determine valuation, and I believe we can build a marketplace solutions light years from what we have now. As I've been working on a marketplace platform plan for products and services of uncertain value, if there are other people who are interested in partnering on the build of such a platform. Please contact me as marketplace efficiency is my passion and I believe that there's an amazing solution out there waiting to solve this problem.
- d23 13y ago
  Can you provide a contact method?
  - TrainedMonkey 13y ago
    Exactly what I was thinking. Craigslist on steroids is an interesting proposition.
    - ChuckFrank 13y ago
      Yes. Optimized for both local and international buying and selling with the purpose of eliminating arbitrage in objects of uncertain value. Added to that, bitcoin, distributed, and built in community escrow -- the first truly 'internet' market.
  - ChuckFrank 13y ago
    brer.frank at gmail (updated above)
- ChuckFrank 13y ago
  Sorry, I thought my contact was visible in my profile (it is to me). You can contact me directly at brer.frank at gmail. I'm also in the Bay Area if anyone wants to meet up to talk in person.
gobengo 13y ago
This is an admittedly ignorant question. Would telehash be a useful application protocol to implement this on? http://telehash.org/ http://telehash.org/ It's built on a distributed hash table (DHT) routing mechanism that is inherently decentralized.
- pogue 13y ago
  Sounds interesting, but I'd have to see it work in a live practice. There's a lot of neat and interesting protocols out there that look good on paper, but in a real world setting completely fail. That's why we've seen a disintegration of services that run outside of port 80 (www).

223 points by goshakkk 13y ago

In SR1 wasn't an additional feature of having the money go through a centralized party that neither party had access to the others BC wallet id? Would doing it this way negatively impact anonymity?

kcorbitt 13y ago
Maybe bitcoins could be moved around in an onion-routing scheme similar to Tor. You might be able to see that a particular wallet ended up with the money but it wouldn't necessarily be possible to see where they came from originally.
- bascule 13y ago
  See Matt Green's Zerocoin concept: http://zerocoin.org/ http://zerocoin.org/
chapel 13y ago
That centralized party is a weak link, and in the case of SR, compromised all BC wallet ids that were used as well as the bitcoins stored.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
GigabyteCoin 13y ago
ZeroCoin is probably the only way a system like this would work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin

gkoberger 13y ago

Don't forget SR1 was shut down due to a forum post that was linked to an anonymous PHP question on Stack Overflow. [1] There's nothing illegal in this repo, sure -- but definitely don't even think of implementing it yourself. Or even use it. [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took-down-the-dread-pirate-roberts/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...

breadtk 13y ago
OPSEC, it's hard.
goshakkk 13y ago
1. it's just an idea of how to make a decentralized SR. 2. I doubt I'll be able to implement it entirely myself regardless. 3. even if I or someone else does, what is bad about it, exactly? It'll be just software. A set of Ruby/JS files. Everyone would be able to run a node so clearly punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option.
- SamuelKillin 13y ago
  That's very naive of you.
- Jgrubb 13y ago
  "punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option" This is dangerously naive. This is exactly what "they" do, if only to brutally discourage anyone else from trying it.
  - doorty 13y ago
    Live free. Don't let "them" scare you into acting out of fear.
    - Jgrubb 13y ago
      I agree with you 100%. I just also think that to claim "oh, I just wrote this software, I can't get in trouble for anything" doesn't take into account either the technological illiteracy of most of the justice system, nor the current environment of what can qualify on the evening news as being a win for the War on Terror.
  - JulianMorrison 13y ago
    Name one example, please. Said example must include: * open source implementation released to the public * author did not directly do anything obviously illegal, or profit by anyone else doing it * overwhelming force under colour of law

dmix 13y ago

Is this similar to Cryptosphere [1]? Federated networks/decentralized hosting seems to be the future for anonymous storage and communication. I'm curious to see what will be the first real world implementation. The black market drug industry always seems to create pioneers of new forms of subversive technology (see narco-subs). [1] https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere

bascule 13y ago
Cryptosphere author here. Thanks for the mention! The brochure site probably provides a better overview than the github project page: http://cryptosphere.org http://cryptosphere.org I should also give a shout out to Tahoe-LAFS, which the Cryptosphere is inspired by. They've also discussed supporting distributed webapps and adding a JavaScript API: https://tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org > I'm curious to see what will be the first real world implementation Cryptosphere, Tahoe-LAFS, and similar systems have all sorts of potential use cases. I'd love to see distributed Facebooks, distributed Wikipedias, and even a distributed DNS registry. One of the reasons I'm using Git as the "object manager" in Cryptosphere is to better facilitate things like forking, so if there's a distributed web site you like, and you don't like the way it's being managed, you could fork your own copy and try to get people to use that instead (licenses permitting, of course!)
- Ixiaus 13y ago
  http://gnunet.org http://gnunet.org deserves a shout-out too I believe.
  - bascule 13y ago
    See also: Freenet, MNet: https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere/wiki/FAQ#q-what-makes-the-cryptosphere-different-from-insert-p2p-system-x-here https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere/wiki/FAQ#q-what...
- saraid216 13y ago
  > distributed Wikipedias Off topic, but I'm curious what you mean by this. The only thing I can imagine you mean is to have Wikipedia's databases sharded everywhere and... that doesn't really make sense to me.

smoyer 13y ago

Funds were also transferred through SR's wallet so they could take their cut.

goshakkk 13y ago
A similar can be implemented with this, too. Basically, when you want to buy something, instead of sending bitcoin manually, the marketplace generates a payment request for you, with two outputs — merchant (the good price) & marketplace (the fee) + some unique ID in the comment field so that the service can link your payment to the order. It can be a QR code or bitcoin:// link or something.
- smoyer 13y ago
  I didn't say you couldn't do it but please describe how this part of the marketplace is distributed.
  - conductr 13y ago
    Would a distributed marketplace even charge a fee? I would assume all users would be happily compensated by the existence of the marketplace. The lack of fees also increase margins/decreases price
    - pogue 13y ago
      Somebody has to pay to host the thing, run it and so forth.
      - Jonovono 13y ago
        Distributed system.
        pogue 13y ago
        Quite right. Still, I think this whole libertarian concept is probably based on the idea of _someone_ making some money somewhere along the lines. :) I assume the mediators would need to be paid, at the bare minimum, probably moderators to filter out junk and spam and whatever other unforeseen circumstances pop up.

kilroy123 13y ago

There were alternatives to SR before the bust, so I imagine one will take its place, and become the biggest. Just like with all large drug enterprises, one falls, another comes in and takes its place. No doubt the other site owners will learn from all this and adapt.

devx 13y ago

Couldn't this work on RetroShare's "forums", too? http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/retroshare-forums/ http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/retroshare-fo...

FBT 13y ago
Yep. I fully expect forums like that to become a dominant mode of communication in the near and medium-term future. All it really needs is for someone to make for it a slick and easy to use interface. If I was in a position at the moment to found a startup, this would absolutely be the field I would found it in.
- atmosx 13y ago
  I don't see any feasible financial model, how will you induce cash flows since you'll need nodes to run the service and these nodes will also be clients? - If I understand correctly that is.
  - FBT 13y ago
    That is a good question. I will first repeat the advice often given to startup founders: Get it working first, find a was to monetize it second. Beyond that, I have had a few thoughts. Yes, I actually agree that this would be a harder endeavour to monetize than most startups, but if it really came to it, you could make a profit. I did not really go deep into these considerations, as (like I said) I don't actually have the resources at the moment to make it a reality, but my main idea was to integrate it somehow with the bitchain. AFter that, there are several ways you can profit. Say, have each post cost a fraction of a bitcoin to propagate it along. It would encourage others to catch the posts and pass them around in the same way bitcoin miners getting bitcoins for mining encourages bitcoin mining. And then I could charge a commision on that. That is one example, of course I would have to way up all the pros and cons of each approach, and of course there is the drawback of any monetization system necessarily introducing some point of centralization, even in a otherwise entirely decentralised system.

pfraze 13y ago

This strikes me as extremely inappropriate. Don't publicly advertise tools for subverting the state. > there are the bad guys with guns ("the state") that can interrupt the operation any moment and try to seize the money This is just childish. There are much worse guys with guns that lack legal and political processes. They generally don't bother us because the state protects citizens. Handle grievances with regulations or criminal code by organizing popular support for policy changes, not by building systems to break the law. Otherwise, expect to be treated as a criminal.

piratebroadcast 13y ago
"This is just childish"- I checked out the twitter handle of the author. He's 16.
- tempeh 13y ago
  Don't marginalize people by their age. That's not an argument.
  - aric 13y ago
    Ageism is never good. However, it perhaps helps to explain his or her mentality. Conflating law with ethics is probably more likely in younger people given the dynamics of authority, or so it seems to me. There's obviously no shortage of people of all ages who are prone to equating [an authority that commands obedience] with [an authority of subjective moral validity]. As any struggle for freedom and liberation movement throughout history will attest, the dynamics of law vs. ethics are often in deep conflict. Time after time, subservient people who "just follow orders" obey cruelty. Heroes resist and are sacrificed. I digress. In the context of the drug war and voluntary interactions among consenting people, [illegal] markets are the logical way to maintain liberation and resistance to [legal] tyranny.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      > Conflating law with ethics is probably more likely in younger people given the dynamics of authority, or so it seems to me. Assuming that somebody progresses through Lawrence Kohlberg's 'stages of moral development' in order as they develop, that seems reasonable. However, the development of this system seems to be evidence that the author does not conflate ethics and the law. Trading drugs is presumably illegal in the authors jurisdiction, yet the author presumably believes themself to be acting ethically in the development of a system that facilitates the trade of drugs. If the author were conflating the law and morality, then he likely would not develop this system because it would facilitate illegal(therefore immoral) behavior. This does not seem to be the case; the author seems to be capable of separating morality and legality.

blahbl4hblah 13y ago

Heres a hint... if the marketplace was just an API that sends and receives data and not a website that sends you the UI including EXECUTABLE code it would be much much harder to subvert... it would also allow other people to build their own UI's around it. websites have some real limitations...

FBT 13y ago

Distributed services are the future, it seems. I predict (rather boldly, so I may be wrong) that the next wave in computer technology will be the move from centralized servers to a distributed framework. I foresee the next Microsoft/Google/Facebook being a company that brings this idea to reality. (Not specifically the Silk Road bit, but the general paradigm of distributed services.)

pogue 13y ago
That may be a very accurate prediction. With the rest of the world afraid of using the US's cloud services for fear of NSA monitoring, something is going to crop up to take its place. First it will be some kind of personal usage, like p2p for trading pirated MP3s and eventually someone will start using it for a business, editing spreadsheets and the like. Decentralized and crypto Office being used by Joe Q Public!

mburns 13y ago

That was a long-winded, meandering way to say 1. Transaction scripts in place of 100% human arbitrage. Reasonable feature. 2. hand-wavy name coin reputation thingy. This idea makes no sense. 3. Being federated would be 'neat', despite the example project being abandoned and largely non-functional. Or you could just use Freenet instead of Tor?

GigabyteCoin 13y ago
> 2. hand-wavy name coin reputation thingy. This idea makes no sense. Using namecoin to keep track of identities makes perfect sense. That's precisely what it was created to do. See http://dot-bit.org/Use_cases http://dot-bit.org/Use_cases Obviously the reputations would need to be stored somewhere, but using Namecoin to say "this arbitrator is definitely the arbitrator you are trying to use for arbitration" would work perfectly well.
- VMG 13y ago
  Adding to this, some reputation is already stored in the blockchain. Former sellers on SR can prove to be owners of previously used addresses.
- mburns 13y ago
  Bitcoin can already do third-party arbitration and Bitcoin addresses (and/or GPG) can already track identity. How does Namecoin help?
  - GigabyteCoin 13y ago
    Namecoin can keep track of the initial date that the particular identity was registered. It can allow for the owner of the identity to quickly update information for everyone to see in the blockchain. It helps a great deal when it comes to keeping track of identities. You can store up to 1kb of data inside a namecoin registration. The above cannot be said of Bitcoin addresses or GPG.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

goshakkk 13y ago
Mediators will be getting a fee, obviously. No one would work for free. With bitcoin, it's just one more transaction output.

debacle 13y ago

It would be easier to just create a new Silk Road website. This site also fails to cover the laundering aspect of sending/receiving from a DPR wallet.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

Horribly underspecified. Reputation based third party arbitration is not even close to a solved problem. The bitcoin block chain does provide a new potential tool in making reputation systems more reliable (a distributed repository of public/private key pairs enables you to reliably tie reputation to a persistent transaction history), but there are lots of free parameters in such a scheme that need to be done right. Additionally, with the node idea, the issue is that most people, including drug dealers, don't want to be mirroring lots of illegal content on their boxes. The set of people who can follow simple rules related to posting on forums and mailing items is much much larger than the set of people who can roll a secure node in a network.

goshakkk 13y ago
The nodes will not "mirror" content of other nodes, no. The nodes will be just storing their own data + provide a UI for browsing content of that node as well as the content of other nodes. So technically you're not hosting anything illegal even if some other node does.
- nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  tell that to TPB, I think anyone hosting a node in such a network would be risking having their boxes seized.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  Freenet gets around this by having the local data store encrypted and invisible to the local user. You may or may not be hosting illegal/terrible things, but you (and more importantly, the bad guys with guns) don't know either.

hosh 13y ago

I want to see this implemented for buying/selling designs for 3D printable things, and other supplies for Makers. I'm talking really basic things like the OSE's tractor designs. Also: is there any way to use these scripts as a form of DRM? The biggest weakness to current DRM schemes is that the validity of a license depends on a trusted party -- the seller, or something like Steam. While such a scheme won't keep people from outright pirating digital goods, I think I would rather trust a p2p DRM scheme than depending on say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble to stay in business.

vog 13y ago
> is there any way to use these scripts as a form of DRM? If you aim for consumer friendliness, you shouldn't do DRM in the first place. > I would rather trust a p2p DRM scheme than depending on say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble to stay in business Since DRM is by definition "defective on purpose" (or "defective by design", as some NGOs say), there is no reason to trust any DRM scheme - p2p or centralized.
- hosh 13y ago
  > If you aim for consumer friendliness, you shouldn't do DRM in the first place. > Since DRM is by definition "defective on purpose" (or "defective by design", as some NGOs say), there is no reason to trust any DRM scheme - p2p or centralized. Those are unexamined assumptions that are driven more by emotion than anything.
  - vog 13y ago
    Indeed, consumer friendliness is mostly about emotions, that is, keeping your users happy. DRM usually makes users annoyed or even angry.
- hosh 13y ago
  There are good use-cases for DRM, for example: http://pastebin.com/VSjCpYxt http://pastebin.com/VSjCpYxt
  - 13y ago

leishulang 13y ago

someone will make it eventually. and when it's done, it will be more than a github repo.

VMG 13y ago

Tip: hide the concept behind some clever academic sounding buzzwords, do not mention SR or black markets at all.

0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago

A title like Silk Road 2.0 makes me think you want attention more than you want a distributed anonymous marketplace. Why not focus on having a distributed marketplace that also happens to be anonymous instead of focusing on the anonymous aspect so much?

okey 13y ago

Calling this SR2 might not be the best idea, given the intent of the original.

yeukhon 13y ago

Why are we encouraging black market?

ebbv 13y ago

What's up with using github for what amounts to a text post? It makes the link misleading (implying that you actually have some code), and it's not a great use of github anyway.

tlarkworthy 13y ago

One of the features of SR was that the money was laundered on entrance and exit to silk road. So you could not tell whose money went to who (despite the bitcoin ledger being public). This proposal is missing that critical feature.

pogue 13y ago
How was that done?* *Hypothetically asking
- saraid216 13y ago
  Upthread there's a link to an Ars Technica article [1], which has this line: > He even ran a program called a "tumbler" to route incoming Bitcoin payments through a complicated series of dummy transactions, so as to make them infeasible to trace through the public Bitcoin blockchain. [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took-down-the-dread-pirate-roberts/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...
  - tlarkworthy 13y ago
    yes this is the tech
- seanalltogether 13y ago
  I think what he's saying that because all money went into one account and out of one account, from the outside you couldn't tell who was sending money to who. It means I can pose as both the buyer and the seller, let silk road take a cut, and turn a big block of known bitcoins into small chunks of unknown bitcoins
orblivion 13y ago
Wait for zerocoin then.

pogue 13y ago

I see the problem with Silk Road not essentially being with the currency or the network mode itself, those both seem effective and appear to have been functioning properly at the time of its shut down (in so far as we know). I think the main issue is the trying to get physical items from point A to point B without getting intercepted/apprehended. It's all well and good to move digital items without getting noticed, but once you start shipping things you have to used pre-existing structures (ie: USPS, Fedex, et al.) which, if not run by the government, has no issue with giving any and all information to them. How to solve this is more complicated than the other parts, IMO. Secondly, the arbitration through a third party I could see as being corruptible, if that third party is known and has no legal ramification/justification for just acting on their own good recognizance. It's like there needs to be a black market escrow that can't be bribed and won't steal the money. Also, I'd just like to add that there are other potentials for connectivity outside of Tor & I2P. Older networks such as Freenet allow this kind of node hosting without having to "invent the wheel" and use some kind of new way to host a forum -- it probably just needs some oil added to the wheels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

stretchwithme 13y ago

Maybe the first step is creating a github-like platform without an attackable central authority.

frank_boyd 13y ago

RetroShare accepts plugins, so could that be an option? It's open-source, decentralized, public key encrypted communication and very easy to install and use: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

ye 13y ago

Freenet is anonymous, distributed storage and application framework. Do we need to reinvent the wheel? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/

aianus 13y ago

Given that PGP keys were extensively used by vendors on Silk Road, wouldn't it be possible to use Silk Road profile and transaction data (I'm sure there exist some site dumps out there) to bootstrap a web of trust? Then a distributed hash table or similar structure can be used to publish product listings, signed transaction data, and feedback to keep everyone updated on who's to be trusted or not. There would be no explicit escrow but lots of people trusted the feedback history and "Finalized Early" on Silk Road without getting scammed.

TomGullen 13y ago

Oh god, something like this surely you'd want to distance yourself away from Silkroad as much as possible? Call it something else. Don't mention SR.

d23 13y ago
I doubt he's gonna make it. I think it was just thrown out there as an idea.
- ChuckFrank 13y ago
  email me.

tlrobinson 13y ago

The problem really boils down to reputation and trust. If you can create a "portable" reputation that can move among decentralized marketplaces the rest is relatively easy. But that's a very hard problem.

wf 13y ago

This is way way off topic but it has been really bothering me lately: Why do so many people misspell "losing"? In the wrap up of the OP: >The federated distributed marketplace will be much more difficult to shut down. And even in the case of shut down, no one is loosing their money. I have been seeing this everywhere lately and someone even tried to argue with me that I was misspelling it. Why is this such a common screw up? Lose only has one o as does lost. I see no plausible explanation.

bookface 13y ago
Sounds to me like you're being intentionally daft. It's pretty easy to see that the /uː/ sound is associated with "oo" way more commonly than "o".
patrikr 13y ago
The OP is a 16 year old from Belarus...
goshakkk 13y ago
It's one of only a few words that I keep misspelling over and over again. But why post a comment dedicated solely to proper spelling of "lose" and wondering why so many people misspell it? What's the point? If anything, you could submit a PR or just say "hey, there is a typo". (Fixed now.)

ChuckFrank 13y ago

Silk Road be damned! A distributed anonymous marketplace has many real and tangible benefits. By having a robust community escrow mechanism, and by having people deal directly with each other with reputational support, a marketplace like this could unleash a new age of internet commerce. Add to this several arbitrage mechanism to determine valuation, and I believe we can build a marketplace solutions light years from what we have now. As I've been working on a marketplace platform plan for products and services of uncertain value, if there are other people who are interested in partnering on the build of such a platform. Please contact me as marketplace efficiency is my passion and I believe that there's an amazing solution out there waiting to solve this problem.

d23 13y ago
Can you provide a contact method?
- TrainedMonkey 13y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking. Craigslist on steroids is an interesting proposition.
  - ChuckFrank 13y ago
    Yes. Optimized for both local and international buying and selling with the purpose of eliminating arbitrage in objects of uncertain value. Added to that, bitcoin, distributed, and built in community escrow -- the first truly 'internet' market.
- ChuckFrank 13y ago
  brer.frank at gmail (updated above)
ChuckFrank 13y ago
Sorry, I thought my contact was visible in my profile (it is to me). You can contact me directly at brer.frank at gmail. I'm also in the Bay Area if anyone wants to meet up to talk in person.

gobengo 13y ago

This is an admittedly ignorant question. Would telehash be a useful application protocol to implement this on? http://telehash.org/ http://telehash.org/ It's built on a distributed hash table (DHT) routing mechanism that is inherently decentralized.

pogue 13y ago
Sounds interesting, but I'd have to see it work in a live practice. There's a lot of neat and interesting protocols out there that look good on paper, but in a real world setting completely fail. That's why we've seen a disintegration of services that run outside of port 80 (www).