6 ms·

A decentralized anonymous marketplace

114 points by cyberviewer 13y ago

m0g 13y ago
I'm not sure with OP doesn't address SilkRoad use cases on top of the ones he mentions, that are clearly a minority if we consider what is likely to happen.
- bertil 13y ago
  Well, actually, one that he describes ‘journalists sharing secrets’ can be as big as the drug trade, if you read ‘journalist’ as ‘black hat hacker’ and ‘secrets’ as ‘exploits’. Silk Road couldn’t really do that, because of possible meddling from the central host, but without that risk…
boredinballard 13y ago
There is a project called BitMarket that runs a market on the bitmessage platform, really neat. https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0 https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0
- lappa 13y ago
  Just a note: This is not decentralized, it is just a centralized marketplace using the decentralized network Bitmessage.
boredinballard 13y ago
There is a project called BitMarket that runs a market on the bitmessage platform, really neat. https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0 https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0
buzzybee 13y ago
I want to see fewer markets. Markets create complex work for people.
- exo762 13y ago
  Can you elaborate?
- runeks 13y ago
  A market is simply two or more people engaging in a transaction. Why would they engage in the transaction if they think it's more work for them?
sadfnjksdf 13y ago
Fully decentralized means everyone has their own autonomous device to act as server and client of the transactions and has a usable decentralized (probably mesh) network. P2P over the standard net is NOT fully decentralized.
infruset 13y ago
I think they might want to reconsidert using bitmessage for communications, because it has some serious security failures as it stands. At least according to https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.0 https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.0
roeme 13y ago
This is interesting; but as a netizen taken part in international transactions outside of ebay/amazon I'm wondering how one can make the whole transaction safe/trusted in the face of complete anonymity for both seller and buyer. Escrows are mentioned; but I can't shake the feeling that malicious individuals can game the whole system by creating a lot of sockpuppets and pulling up a smokescreen of trust, ultimately ripping somebody off in a high-value transaction, either as a seller or buyer. It was/is possible on the platforms mentioned above; I don't imagine it more difficult in a anonymous market. Looking forward to their results and insights to this.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
This was what the internet was supposed to be all along, correct? A place where data can move freely from point to point without oversight or control from a central authority. Strange that we seem to have to keep trying to get back to where we started.
- celticninja 13y ago
  this is not about data, this is about the transacting of physical goods over the internet. I am not sure you understand a) what the OP is suggesting or b) what you are saying.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    Nope, I got it. I conflated "data" and "purchases", mainly because they are both transactional, and the difference between pure data and physical goods is decreasing by the day. Thanks for pointing out the difference, though. I should have been clearer in my comment.
iamsalman 13y ago
My 2 cents: The element of trust is primary for any financial transaction. There's a reason why eBay Amazon et al employ thousands for conflict resolution b/w buyers and sellers. I wouldn't mind going on SilkRoad for acquiring something which I otherwise cannot but for items which are available elsewhere, I don't mind giving up tiny bit of control while transacting on a commercial platform like eBay.
- wildgift 13y ago
  I think the relationship is desirable, which is why some people will pay a higher price to have a relationship with a vendor, with the understanding that if s transaction goes wrong, the vendor won't balk at fixing the problem. There might also be an expectation that one party or other will extend credit for a few days. In contrast, there are touch-and-go relationships all the time, like at convenience stores. You can't have the exchange without being present for the entire transaction, because neither party trusts the other.
- runeks 13y ago
  Escrow services would have to be an integral part of the architecture. The buyer pays the vendor via an, initially, unsigned multisig 2-of-3 transaction, and the goods are sent when the buyer, the vendor and the escrow service each hold a copy. When the buyer receives the items, he signs the transaction and sends it to the vendor, who signs it and it's valid. If a dispute occurs, the escrow service will have to decide the case, and side with whichever party it finds most credible. A reputation system for escrow services will be as important as one for vendors, as far as I can see, and they need to be compensated for their service, of course.
- amac 13y ago
  I agree with this. I'm thinking about building a decentralized marketplace but without anonymity for this very reason.
treirich 13y ago
When I read this proposal I immediately thought that Namecoin could be an asset, being a decentralized DNS. Maybe use a variant of Namecoin on individual 'store' nodes to resolve them to a single (non-ICANN) TLD that can be spidered and displayed by several aggregators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
hendzen 13y ago
Fun fact: the original Satoshi bitcoin code included a partially completed distributed market system. Check out the file market.cpp in version 0.1.0. That said, some major challenges (I've done a bit of thinking about this) - First: Sybil attacks on the reputation system. The author alluded to this but the solution given was vaguely specified and somewhat reminiscent of social network driven overlays like Tonika that a) are inherently problematic for anonymity, and b) hard to grow due to aforementioned invite problem. Another problem is maintaining anonymity while making things efficient - the obvious design would be DHT based but this leads to a whole host of weaknesses (see a paper called 'Hashing it Out In Public' for details), and leads to fragility as DHTs are weakened by high rates of churn, which are quite common in real world p2p networks. Have quite a bit more to say on this topic but I'm on mobile at the moment, may write up an essay at some point. I would encourage the OP to read up on some of Peter Todd's ideas around fidelity bonds for some ideas on the reputation aspect, also have a look at a (centralized) marketplace called NashX for dispute resolution. EDIT: also check out the bitcoin-otc web of trust.
- runeks 13y ago
  > Fun fact: the original Satoshi bitcoin code included a partially completed distributed market system. Check out the file market.cpp in version 0.1.0. For the curious; content of market.cpp and market.h: http://pastebin.com/aa82ajub http://pastebin.com/aa82ajub
  - liamzebedee 13y ago
    This system was spread out among other files, including a review system and such. The commit where Satoshi has removed it provides a nice overview: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995ede03fb934edd67f1359ba8 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995e...
- amirouche 13y ago
  The essay your talking about interest me. To be precise, I'm interested in knowing your point of view regarding the viability of a social network which database is stored in DHT. edit: in my point of view, marketplace is just another social network.
runeks 13y ago
As far as I can see, the essential problem with decentralized anonymous marketplaces is that reviews need to cost money. Plain and simple. Good reviews have great value, so they need to have a non-zero price. A vendor's review history is the indicator by which you assess whether a vendor is trustworthy or not, and a vendor should have to pay to achieve a trustworthy reputation - if good reviews are free, and you can make money from good reviews, they would have little value. This is the reason spam emails are so frequent: you can make money from something that costs very little. If reviews were near-free, good reviews would be as plentiful as spam emails. Free reviews means vendors can make sock-puppet accounts, fake a transaction, and leave a five-star review to themselves. With Silk Road, they take x% of the value of each transaction (or if not, that's at least how it should be), so if a vendor seeks to inflate their review score, they will pay a price for it. In fact, a good overall review score for a vendor - as far as I can tell - is the sum of all the review "values" (1 to five stars) multiplied by the value of the transaction in question. So a vendor with 10 five-star reviews on 10 orders of a value of 1 BTC each, would have the same score as a vendor with a single five-star review on a single transaction with a value of 10 BTC. Both these vendors would have paid the same amount of money to get this, equal, review score. I've thought a bit about this, and I don't see how this can be solved in a decentralized market, with no middleman to tax transactions, and make sure that vendors can't get free reviews.
- hendzen 13y ago
  You can use proof-of-sacrifice to give reviews a cost. Look up OP_RETURN in relation to bitcoin.
  - runeks 13y ago
    Without having thought about it further, this might work. All we would need to do would be to "burn" a certain percentage of the transaction, eg. by sending it to an provably unspendable address (a hash160 of all zeros, for example). So the transaction from the customer to the vendor, paying for the goods, would be a 2-of-3 multi-signature transaction (of which the customer, the vendor and the escrow agent each hold a copy), with an output (let's call it output1) to the vendor (paying them for the product), and an OP_RETURN output which specifies a review value (for example, 1 to 5). output1 will then have to be redeemed in a new transaction (created by the vendor), and this transaction will include an output that burns x% of the amount redeemed from output1, and an OP_RETURN output that specifies the vendor's public key. To calculate the aforementioned total review score for a vendor, all you do is check every transaction that contains the vendor's public key in the OP_RETURN output, and take the sum of the review value multiplied by the amount of bitcoins burned for each of these transactions.
logicchains 13y ago
As a market anarchist, I think it's important to point out that the concept of 'reputation' plays a significant role in many justifications of how a market may function without regulation or any other form of state oversight. Making a market completely anonymous significantly limits the role reputation can play, which leads me to wonder whether some of the standard arguments for the effectiveness of markets don't apply in this case.
- pliny 13y ago
  One of the goals in the OP: >* Allow users to maintain a pseudonymous identity that carries anonymous trust across transactions. i.e. anonymous as in it's difficult to establish a real world identity for sellers not anonymous as in no persistent identities at all. Bootstrapping such a marketplace is obviously difficult, since it's never safe to buy from someone without reputation but everybody starts without reputation - it might be possible to demand some proof-of-work-money to establish a marketplace identity, but I'm not sure where the money would go.
  - runeks 13y ago
    > Bootstrapping such a marketplace is obviously difficult, since it's never safe to buy from someone without reputation but everybody starts without reputation - it might be possible to demand some proof-of-work-money to establish a marketplace identity, but I'm not sure where the money would go. I think this is a sensible approach. The money (bitcoins) could simply be destroyed in a transaction associating an identity with the "burn". It would act as the equivalent of a fidelity bond, except the funds would not be recoverable. Perhaps it would make sense to only require this for new vendors, since the cost of a single "burn" for a vendor would be small compared to future revenue, but large for a potential customer, who might not know if they will ever use the service again.
  - logicchains 13y ago
    But if the identity is not connected to a real world identity, there is no legal recourse if that identity cheats you. Most who advocate a pure free market still accept the need for a legal system (not necessarily a State-based one), such that for instance people who take your money without delivering the good may be sued. An anonymous market means that there's no legal recourse if someone cheats you or steals from you.
dan_bk 13y ago
> * Are there any similar attempts we can contribute to or borrow ideas from instead of implementing something on our own? RetroShare could be used as a platform for this, given that it's: - 100% Decentralized - Public key encrypted - Open source ...and accepts plug-ins for new features. See: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
rk17 13y ago
The advantages of the anonymous marketplace only really apply to people who's work is being suppressed (activists/journalists) or who's work is rightfully being persecuted (criminals). Maybe there's a case to be made that a lot of people do want to know who they're dealing with, besides that the system (algorithm etc.) thinks they're thrust worthy.
- Thiz 13y ago
  In countries like Venezuela, where government is enforcing laws for price control and shops are shutting down everywhere, an anonymous marketplace would be a godsend. Citizens under totalitarian regimes are the ones who benefit most from crypto currencies, crypto messaging and crypto markets.
  - rk17 13y ago
    Yeah, I should have included that example. Just adding that repression on that scale actually merits regime change more than finding a workaround. Although the workaround might be more feasible in most cases. So, it's a good initiative.
mrfusion 13y ago
People are mentioning the need for reviews in such a marketplace. I present one possible solution: > Users pay some fee to leave reviews. the more they pay the more the review is weighted. > Buyers can rate the reviews on how helpful they are. > A small transaction fee is collected from every transaction and distributed to reviewers proportionate to how many votes their each of their reviews has gotten. I imagine this would prevent review spam, and reward people who post good reviews. In fact it could even support a class of professional reviewers making a living off of reviewing sellers and products.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  What stops company making it, to just pay $10000 to heavily bias their own review?
- allworknoplay 13y ago
  This is incredibly open to abuse by both vendors and their competitors. A rater's "realness" is probably much better judged by other measures of marketplace activity or simply equal weighting than by their willingness to pay to bias the ranking of a particular review. I'd tend to defer to what's worked in other (semi) anonymous markets -- it's pretty easy to tell when someone is real or not based on their activity patterns. A better policy is probably to keep raw information available and let people parse it in different ways, rather than baking in a risky and probably fragile system we hope will work.
lappa 13y ago
I've written a description for the potential implementation of a decentralized pseudonymous marketplace. I would appreciate any critical analysis of it. https://github.com/lapp0/Smart-Market https://github.com/lapp0/Smart-Market
- runeks 13y ago
  In my humble opinion, after the advent of bitcoin, there is no longer a reason for a client to do proof-of-work. Bitcoin basically outsources proof-of-work to miners, and presents you with a token that represents proof-of-work. As money, bitcoin proves - just as proof-of-work - that you've worked for it, there is no such thing as free money. The price of a unit of proof-of-work varies wildly, depending on what hardware you have. The price of money is the same for everyone, or at least varies much less. The problem with proof-of-work is that attackers can invest in powerful hardware - as your spec notes - and have an advantage over other nodes. When paying in bitcoin, as a spam prevention mechanism, no one has an advantage over others. Everyone pays the current market price for bitcoins, and even the miners - who generate bitcoins, and so don't pay the market price - can sell their coins at the market price, so it still comes down to "do I want to use these bitcoins to spam this network, or do I want to sell the coins for $575 per piece?".
  - lappa 13y ago
    I agree and don't plan on using PoW other than in the proof of concept. V0.2 should use PoS because proof of burn (as a believe you are suggesting) is bad for the Bitcoin network (large number of unnecessary tx) and expensive (you don't want to pay the tx fee every time you view a listing). PoS doesn't require any tx in the Bitcoin network (ignoring those you used to earn the stake). Thanks for the comment. Let me know if you have any other concerns.
    - runeks 13y ago
      > V0.2 should use PoS because proof of burn (as a believe you are suggesting) is bad for the Bitcoin network (large number of unnecessary tx) and expensive (you don't want to pay the tx fee every time you view a listing). My suggestion was related to ratings, not viewing listings. I think that if the network reaches a sufficient size (thousands of nodes), retrieving listings won't be a problem. Hosts can simply throttle connections, and refuse to send out more than a certain number of listing to a single host in a certain time frame. I don't see proof-of-burn as bad for the Bitcoin network. Proof-of-burn transactions are instantly pruneable, so they don't really put a burden on nodes (other than the 200 bytes they take up in storage space).
justinjlynn 13y ago
Hi. I've been working on a system very similar to OPs description for months now -- http://portobello-road.org http://portobello-road.org . Must be an idea who's time has come, eh? Now I know how Newton and Liebniz felt when they discovered they'd simultaneously invented calculus. Aside from a few architectural decisions (hubs and marketplaces instead of DHT for seller data dissemination and indexing) things are much the same. Would love to join forces and do something cool. I've already gotten a whitepaper put together (though very incomplete I've done a lot of the work in getting a build system for LaTeX up and going and a structure in place) and an initial implementation of a downloadable nodewebkit client and some server code. Just starting on documentation of the communications protocol and getting things going, so it's not very far along. Open to all discussions and debate regarding architecture and specifics.
- justinjlynn 13y ago
  Oh, forgot to directly link the codebase. It's at https://github.com/portobello-road https://github.com/portobello-road
- brickmort 13y ago
  very cool! I love the name. It sounds like a b-side by Ween or something. Portobello Road.
64598u3wieodsk 13y ago
SpeakEasy comes to mind. It was very much in its infancy last time I checked, but the ideas behind it seemed profound. I don’t have access to .onion sites right now, and I don’t have the url either, but maybe someone remembers and can post the link (assuming it's still up).

114 points by cyberviewer 13y ago

m0g 13y ago

I'm not sure with OP doesn't address SilkRoad use cases on top of the ones he mentions, that are clearly a minority if we consider what is likely to happen.

bertil 13y ago
Well, actually, one that he describes ‘journalists sharing secrets’ can be as big as the drug trade, if you read ‘journalist’ as ‘black hat hacker’ and ‘secrets’ as ‘exploits’. Silk Road couldn’t really do that, because of possible meddling from the central host, but without that risk…

boredinballard 13y ago

There is a project called BitMarket that runs a market on the bitmessage platform, really neat. https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0 https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0

lappa 13y ago
Just a note: This is not decentralized, it is just a centralized marketplace using the decentralized network Bitmessage.

boredinballard 13y ago

buzzybee 13y ago

I want to see fewer markets. Markets create complex work for people.

exo762 13y ago
Can you elaborate?
runeks 13y ago
A market is simply two or more people engaging in a transaction. Why would they engage in the transaction if they think it's more work for them?

sadfnjksdf 13y ago

Fully decentralized means everyone has their own autonomous device to act as server and client of the transactions and has a usable decentralized (probably mesh) network. P2P over the standard net is NOT fully decentralized.

infruset 13y ago

I think they might want to reconsidert using bitmessage for communications, because it has some serious security failures as it stands. At least according to https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.0 https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.0

roeme 13y ago

This is interesting; but as a netizen taken part in international transactions outside of ebay/amazon I'm wondering how one can make the whole transaction safe/trusted in the face of complete anonymity for both seller and buyer. Escrows are mentioned; but I can't shake the feeling that malicious individuals can game the whole system by creating a lot of sockpuppets and pulling up a smokescreen of trust, ultimately ripping somebody off in a high-value transaction, either as a seller or buyer. It was/is possible on the platforms mentioned above; I don't imagine it more difficult in a anonymous market. Looking forward to their results and insights to this.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

This was what the internet was supposed to be all along, correct? A place where data can move freely from point to point without oversight or control from a central authority. Strange that we seem to have to keep trying to get back to where we started.

celticninja 13y ago
this is not about data, this is about the transacting of physical goods over the internet. I am not sure you understand a) what the OP is suggesting or b) what you are saying.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Nope, I got it. I conflated "data" and "purchases", mainly because they are both transactional, and the difference between pure data and physical goods is decreasing by the day. Thanks for pointing out the difference, though. I should have been clearer in my comment.

iamsalman 13y ago

My 2 cents: The element of trust is primary for any financial transaction. There's a reason why eBay Amazon et al employ thousands for conflict resolution b/w buyers and sellers. I wouldn't mind going on SilkRoad for acquiring something which I otherwise cannot but for items which are available elsewhere, I don't mind giving up tiny bit of control while transacting on a commercial platform like eBay.

wildgift 13y ago
I think the relationship is desirable, which is why some people will pay a higher price to have a relationship with a vendor, with the understanding that if s transaction goes wrong, the vendor won't balk at fixing the problem. There might also be an expectation that one party or other will extend credit for a few days. In contrast, there are touch-and-go relationships all the time, like at convenience stores. You can't have the exchange without being present for the entire transaction, because neither party trusts the other.
runeks 13y ago
Escrow services would have to be an integral part of the architecture. The buyer pays the vendor via an, initially, unsigned multisig 2-of-3 transaction, and the goods are sent when the buyer, the vendor and the escrow service each hold a copy. When the buyer receives the items, he signs the transaction and sends it to the vendor, who signs it and it's valid. If a dispute occurs, the escrow service will have to decide the case, and side with whichever party it finds most credible. A reputation system for escrow services will be as important as one for vendors, as far as I can see, and they need to be compensated for their service, of course.
amac 13y ago
I agree with this. I'm thinking about building a decentralized marketplace but without anonymity for this very reason.

treirich 13y ago

When I read this proposal I immediately thought that Namecoin could be an asset, being a decentralized DNS. Maybe use a variant of Namecoin on individual 'store' nodes to resolve them to a single (non-ICANN) TLD that can be spidered and displayed by several aggregators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

hendzen 13y ago

Fun fact: the original Satoshi bitcoin code included a partially completed distributed market system. Check out the file market.cpp in version 0.1.0. That said, some major challenges (I've done a bit of thinking about this) - First: Sybil attacks on the reputation system. The author alluded to this but the solution given was vaguely specified and somewhat reminiscent of social network driven overlays like Tonika that a) are inherently problematic for anonymity, and b) hard to grow due to aforementioned invite problem. Another problem is maintaining anonymity while making things efficient - the obvious design would be DHT based but this leads to a whole host of weaknesses (see a paper called 'Hashing it Out In Public' for details), and leads to fragility as DHTs are weakened by high rates of churn, which are quite common in real world p2p networks. Have quite a bit more to say on this topic but I'm on mobile at the moment, may write up an essay at some point. I would encourage the OP to read up on some of Peter Todd's ideas around fidelity bonds for some ideas on the reputation aspect, also have a look at a (centralized) marketplace called NashX for dispute resolution. EDIT: also check out the bitcoin-otc web of trust.

runeks 13y ago
> Fun fact: the original Satoshi bitcoin code included a partially completed distributed market system. Check out the file market.cpp in version 0.1.0. For the curious; content of market.cpp and market.h: http://pastebin.com/aa82ajub http://pastebin.com/aa82ajub
- liamzebedee 13y ago
  This system was spread out among other files, including a review system and such. The commit where Satoshi has removed it provides a nice overview: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995ede03fb934edd67f1359ba8 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995e...
amirouche 13y ago
The essay your talking about interest me. To be precise, I'm interested in knowing your point of view regarding the viability of a social network which database is stored in DHT. edit: in my point of view, marketplace is just another social network.

runeks 13y ago

As far as I can see, the essential problem with decentralized anonymous marketplaces is that reviews need to cost money. Plain and simple. Good reviews have great value, so they need to have a non-zero price. A vendor's review history is the indicator by which you assess whether a vendor is trustworthy or not, and a vendor should have to pay to achieve a trustworthy reputation - if good reviews are free, and you can make money from good reviews, they would have little value. This is the reason spam emails are so frequent: you can make money from something that costs very little. If reviews were near-free, good reviews would be as plentiful as spam emails. Free reviews means vendors can make sock-puppet accounts, fake a transaction, and leave a five-star review to themselves. With Silk Road, they take x% of the value of each transaction (or if not, that's at least how it should be), so if a vendor seeks to inflate their review score, they will pay a price for it. In fact, a good overall review score for a vendor - as far as I can tell - is the sum of all the review "values" (1 to five stars) multiplied by the value of the transaction in question. So a vendor with 10 five-star reviews on 10 orders of a value of 1 BTC each, would have the same score as a vendor with a single five-star review on a single transaction with a value of 10 BTC. Both these vendors would have paid the same amount of money to get this, equal, review score. I've thought a bit about this, and I don't see how this can be solved in a decentralized market, with no middleman to tax transactions, and make sure that vendors can't get free reviews.

hendzen 13y ago
You can use proof-of-sacrifice to give reviews a cost. Look up OP_RETURN in relation to bitcoin.
- runeks 13y ago
  Without having thought about it further, this might work. All we would need to do would be to "burn" a certain percentage of the transaction, eg. by sending it to an provably unspendable address (a hash160 of all zeros, for example). So the transaction from the customer to the vendor, paying for the goods, would be a 2-of-3 multi-signature transaction (of which the customer, the vendor and the escrow agent each hold a copy), with an output (let's call it output1) to the vendor (paying them for the product), and an OP_RETURN output which specifies a review value (for example, 1 to 5). output1 will then have to be redeemed in a new transaction (created by the vendor), and this transaction will include an output that burns x% of the amount redeemed from output1, and an OP_RETURN output that specifies the vendor's public key. To calculate the aforementioned total review score for a vendor, all you do is check every transaction that contains the vendor's public key in the OP_RETURN output, and take the sum of the review value multiplied by the amount of bitcoins burned for each of these transactions.

logicchains 13y ago

As a market anarchist, I think it's important to point out that the concept of 'reputation' plays a significant role in many justifications of how a market may function without regulation or any other form of state oversight. Making a market completely anonymous significantly limits the role reputation can play, which leads me to wonder whether some of the standard arguments for the effectiveness of markets don't apply in this case.

pliny 13y ago
One of the goals in the OP: >* Allow users to maintain a pseudonymous identity that carries anonymous trust across transactions. i.e. anonymous as in it's difficult to establish a real world identity for sellers not anonymous as in no persistent identities at all. Bootstrapping such a marketplace is obviously difficult, since it's never safe to buy from someone without reputation but everybody starts without reputation - it might be possible to demand some proof-of-work-money to establish a marketplace identity, but I'm not sure where the money would go.
- runeks 13y ago
  > Bootstrapping such a marketplace is obviously difficult, since it's never safe to buy from someone without reputation but everybody starts without reputation - it might be possible to demand some proof-of-work-money to establish a marketplace identity, but I'm not sure where the money would go. I think this is a sensible approach. The money (bitcoins) could simply be destroyed in a transaction associating an identity with the "burn". It would act as the equivalent of a fidelity bond, except the funds would not be recoverable. Perhaps it would make sense to only require this for new vendors, since the cost of a single "burn" for a vendor would be small compared to future revenue, but large for a potential customer, who might not know if they will ever use the service again.
- logicchains 13y ago
  But if the identity is not connected to a real world identity, there is no legal recourse if that identity cheats you. Most who advocate a pure free market still accept the need for a legal system (not necessarily a State-based one), such that for instance people who take your money without delivering the good may be sued. An anonymous market means that there's no legal recourse if someone cheats you or steals from you.

dan_bk 13y ago

> * Are there any similar attempts we can contribute to or borrow ideas from instead of implementing something on our own? RetroShare could be used as a platform for this, given that it's: - 100% Decentralized - Public key encrypted - Open source ...and accepts plug-ins for new features. See: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

rk17 13y ago

The advantages of the anonymous marketplace only really apply to people who's work is being suppressed (activists/journalists) or who's work is rightfully being persecuted (criminals). Maybe there's a case to be made that a lot of people do want to know who they're dealing with, besides that the system (algorithm etc.) thinks they're thrust worthy.

Thiz 13y ago
In countries like Venezuela, where government is enforcing laws for price control and shops are shutting down everywhere, an anonymous marketplace would be a godsend. Citizens under totalitarian regimes are the ones who benefit most from crypto currencies, crypto messaging and crypto markets.
- rk17 13y ago
  Yeah, I should have included that example. Just adding that repression on that scale actually merits regime change more than finding a workaround. Although the workaround might be more feasible in most cases. So, it's a good initiative.

mrfusion 13y ago

People are mentioning the need for reviews in such a marketplace. I present one possible solution: > Users pay some fee to leave reviews. the more they pay the more the review is weighted. > Buyers can rate the reviews on how helpful they are. > A small transaction fee is collected from every transaction and distributed to reviewers proportionate to how many votes their each of their reviews has gotten. I imagine this would prevent review spam, and reward people who post good reviews. In fact it could even support a class of professional reviewers making a living off of reviewing sellers and products.

Ygg2 13y ago
What stops company making it, to just pay $10000 to heavily bias their own review?
allworknoplay 13y ago
This is incredibly open to abuse by both vendors and their competitors. A rater's "realness" is probably much better judged by other measures of marketplace activity or simply equal weighting than by their willingness to pay to bias the ranking of a particular review. I'd tend to defer to what's worked in other (semi) anonymous markets -- it's pretty easy to tell when someone is real or not based on their activity patterns. A better policy is probably to keep raw information available and let people parse it in different ways, rather than baking in a risky and probably fragile system we hope will work.

lappa 13y ago

I've written a description for the potential implementation of a decentralized pseudonymous marketplace. I would appreciate any critical analysis of it. https://github.com/lapp0/Smart-Market https://github.com/lapp0/Smart-Market

runeks 13y ago
In my humble opinion, after the advent of bitcoin, there is no longer a reason for a client to do proof-of-work. Bitcoin basically outsources proof-of-work to miners, and presents you with a token that represents proof-of-work. As money, bitcoin proves - just as proof-of-work - that you've worked for it, there is no such thing as free money. The price of a unit of proof-of-work varies wildly, depending on what hardware you have. The price of money is the same for everyone, or at least varies much less. The problem with proof-of-work is that attackers can invest in powerful hardware - as your spec notes - and have an advantage over other nodes. When paying in bitcoin, as a spam prevention mechanism, no one has an advantage over others. Everyone pays the current market price for bitcoins, and even the miners - who generate bitcoins, and so don't pay the market price - can sell their coins at the market price, so it still comes down to "do I want to use these bitcoins to spam this network, or do I want to sell the coins for $575 per piece?".
- lappa 13y ago
  I agree and don't plan on using PoW other than in the proof of concept. V0.2 should use PoS because proof of burn (as a believe you are suggesting) is bad for the Bitcoin network (large number of unnecessary tx) and expensive (you don't want to pay the tx fee every time you view a listing). PoS doesn't require any tx in the Bitcoin network (ignoring those you used to earn the stake). Thanks for the comment. Let me know if you have any other concerns.
  - runeks 13y ago
    > V0.2 should use PoS because proof of burn (as a believe you are suggesting) is bad for the Bitcoin network (large number of unnecessary tx) and expensive (you don't want to pay the tx fee every time you view a listing). My suggestion was related to ratings, not viewing listings. I think that if the network reaches a sufficient size (thousands of nodes), retrieving listings won't be a problem. Hosts can simply throttle connections, and refuse to send out more than a certain number of listing to a single host in a certain time frame. I don't see proof-of-burn as bad for the Bitcoin network. Proof-of-burn transactions are instantly pruneable, so they don't really put a burden on nodes (other than the 200 bytes they take up in storage space).

justinjlynn 13y ago

Hi. I've been working on a system very similar to OPs description for months now -- http://portobello-road.org http://portobello-road.org . Must be an idea who's time has come, eh? Now I know how Newton and Liebniz felt when they discovered they'd simultaneously invented calculus. Aside from a few architectural decisions (hubs and marketplaces instead of DHT for seller data dissemination and indexing) things are much the same. Would love to join forces and do something cool. I've already gotten a whitepaper put together (though very incomplete I've done a lot of the work in getting a build system for LaTeX up and going and a structure in place) and an initial implementation of a downloadable nodewebkit client and some server code. Just starting on documentation of the communications protocol and getting things going, so it's not very far along. Open to all discussions and debate regarding architecture and specifics.

justinjlynn 13y ago
Oh, forgot to directly link the codebase. It's at https://github.com/portobello-road https://github.com/portobello-road
brickmort 13y ago
very cool! I love the name. It sounds like a b-side by Ween or something. Portobello Road.

64598u3wieodsk 13y ago

SpeakEasy comes to mind. It was very much in its infancy last time I checked, but the ideas behind it seemed profound. I don’t have access to .onion sites right now, and I don’t have the url either, but maybe someone remembers and can post the link (assuming it's still up).