Topic: [BETA] Dark Exchange: a 100% decentralized p2p exchange - page 2. (Read 15866 times)

Has this project gotten any traction?

Yeah, I think this is the best idea so far. That way as long as there is one person who is online they can act as a server to start with. As the community grows it will be more distributed.

If private/public key signing was used then we can guarantee who made the offer and who accepted the ofefer. For example an accepted offer can be timestamped so that whenever somebody.accepts an offer that has already been made the accepted offer is rejected.

Ideally the objective is for a critical mass of nodes are always online making sure the orderbook is always up-to-date.

Is there anything I can do to help out, morpheus?

I would like to add an in person option, but that would require some significant changes which I'm not prepared to do yet.

I've added another issue for in person transfers: https://github.com/macourtney/Dark-Exchange/issues/50

I make no promises on when I can get to it. Of course, if anyone implements it for me, I'll be glad to merge it in.

There is still no way to make an offer and have it available when you go offline. The 'pass-the-parcel' technique likely won't work since you don't really log off, but just disconnect from the network.

How about every node in the system keeps track of every offer (for now, only a subset in the future). If you're not online, it doesn't matter, someone somewhere has your offer. It would get tricky to keep track of the offers as they are accepted/rejected, but it would be possible.

Would that work for you?

Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to work on Dark Exchange lately. I'm in the middle of adding a trust score to the system. When I have that in, I can look into something like this and fixing other issues.

I didn't realize there was still so much interest in the project.

I'll look into adding a warning message if the I2P network cannot be found. Issue 48: https://github.com/macourtney/Dark-Exchange/issues/48

Obviously, multiple searches and searching on multiple payment types is a popular feature request. I already have searching on multiple payment types as an issue: https://github.com/macourtney/Dark-Exchange/issues/37

I just added a new issue for running multiple searches at the same time. Issue 49: https://github.com/macourtney/Dark-Exchange/issues/49

Is there still no way to make an offer and have it available for others to view when you go offline?

I understand this is very difficult to do in a decentralised manner, but I feel this problem is halting Dark Exchange's community growth.

It is quite clear that when people log on only to find themselves online, thus no offers, it makes it look like you have entered an empty hall expecting a bustling market. If this happens I believe more people will use it.

My suggestion is to have some kind of 'pass-the-parcel' technique where a node locally stores tgeir offers, and before it logs off it passes those offers to any online nodes before logging off, and thatnode does the same thing, and so on.

When a node comes back online, it can reclaim those offers so that it can broadcadt them itself.

Any thoughts?

Ha, now that you mention it, I did exactly the same Now it works, but I can't find anything... I created a offer and searched for it, but it won't find it.

Suggestion: OP, can you add a "in person transfer in " option for trading?

I forgot to run i2p before Dark Exchange the first time I ran it.

It appeared to work find though, creating a username etc. But then I noticed no peers. There should be something to monitor network activity so we know what's going on.

Would also be nice to make more than one search at the same time... or search for multiple offers because I haven't been able to find any yet.

I like the Dark Exchange idea. I will have a closer look at it. Thanks for the answers.

Yes, this is exactly how Dark Exchange works right now.


Currently, there is no escrow service or anything really to prevent Alice from never sending bitcoins to Bob. However, when Alice and Bob created their accounts, a public/private key pair was created. When interacting, Alice and Bob can see each other's public key (it's actually shown in several places in Dark Exchange so you can recognize a user). Since all messages between nodes are signed (except certain messages which cannot be signed since they are sent before you have the public keys), Alice and Bob know they are talking to each other and only to each other.

If Alice wants to sell more bitcoin to Bob in the future, she will have to send the bitcoin. Also, it's possible for Bob to warn people not to buy from Alice if she doesn't uphold her end of the deal. There is no way of doing this in Dark Exchange for now, so Bob would have to use this board. However, we are planning on implementing a trust scoring system which would make it easy for Bob to let others know how much he trusts Alice and vice versa.


I don't think this is possible without creating an authority, or several authorities which centralizes the distributed exchange. It would become more of a federated exchange than a distributed one.

If there is enough demand, it may be a good idea to implement in the future. However, I always want to give people the option to use Dark Exchange in a pure decentralized manner.

quick question:

Would it be possible to create a market like mtGox, only with a distributed model? I guess we would have to have Agents for fiat money transfer and withdrawals then.

Any idea of how that would be solved?

I guess it's at the moment like this:


Bob wants to buy 100 BTC at 15.0 from Alice. Alice accepts. Bob transfers 100x15USD to Alice and Alice transfers the bitcoins to Bob. How to trust other users? Should there be some kind of escrow, and would we not need a centralized point for escrow? What prevents Alice from never sending the bitcoins to Bob?

Nice initiative though. Thumbs up!

I've uploaded Beta 3 with more aggressive attempts to download all other destinations in the network. My testing suggests everyone should quickly get all of the destinations in the system.

You can download Beta 3 from: https://github.com/macourtney/Dark-Exchange/downloads

It's nothing. I wasn't very careful when writing some of the event code, and the event thread is blocked after most of the button presses. It's easy to fix, but it does look like Dark Exchange is locked up. All you have to do is wait a few more seconds (possibly minutes) and it should work itself out.

I added an issue for it.

I had the message window freeze up after hitting send once or twice, no errors or anything. I just waited a minute or so and restarted the client and the message had been sent so I don't think it could cause major problems with trades. It might just have been me though, so I'd call it complete.

That's awesome! I hope it was a good experience.

Is there any reason the exchange is not complete yet? Was there any problems?

Ah! Sorry, I'm a little slow.

Announcing and identifying a trade on a dark exchange.

First trade complete without a hitch!

I'm missing it. Whats ironic?

The irony inherent in this statement is not lost on me.

wegotpickles and I have almost completed the first dark exchange trade!