Topic: wtb cryptograpically secured decetralized p2p marketplace/auction service (Read 845 times)

This isnt insoluble. Build it into the protocol so that when someone rates a seller their rating is multiplied times the amount of coins used in the transaction. This way positive ratings for more expensive items would be waited proportionately. As a buyer you would only buy expensive items from sellers who gradually worked their way up to being able to sell high dollar items one step at a time. When a potential buyer does a search advanced filtering options could allow them to weed out sellers who had no reputation for consistency in selling high dollar items.


i think you may be missing the point a little here. No one would "own" this service any more than anyone "owns" the bitcoin service.


the moment it is no longer an organic anarchic solution i no longer have any interest, i may as well just use ebay.


perfectly understandable, but i feel differently, i personally do not need 100% assurance that my transaction will be smooth. i would be fine with knowing that there is a 1% chance that i will not receive my product in exchange for having a truly free market. Another way to look at it is that a company will always charge a commission even bitmit charges a very reasonable 2%. The system i describe would charge no commission so this would, atleast to some degree, offset the fact that transactions could not be insured.

As much as I hate PayPal / eBay the fact is some of those precautions implemented are their for your safety. I can trust a top rated seller on eBay to ship me a product or know that my money is safe via Buyer's Protection but on a decentralized P2P marketplace, ratings wouldn't mean a whole lot to me. There'd be nothing stopping someone selling low items to gain feedback, gain trusted status and then pull of a major scam. Sure you could implement an escrow system but what's to say someone won't send an empty box, or someone might even lie about the product to get it for free? There'd be a lot of liability on the owners of such a site if something like this happened.

You could do something similar to BTCJam by using a soft credit check, but again there is enormous potential for abuse since it's not a legally binding contact, so someone could just verify themselves by using someone else's identity (IE, trusted friend.) and they would both walk away with the money and there wouldn't be much legal repercussion.

For me, a marketplace has to make me feel secure. I know that my money is recoverable if something goes wrong on eBay. If eBay don't want to co-operate I can open a dispute with my credit card provider and recover my money through there. There's literally no protection on such a marketplace you described, and if implementation of such features was introduced then imho it kind of takes away from the anonymity side.

The resent announcement by bitmit got me thinking. It is so its wonderful that we have a service like bitcoin that is impervious to government attacks due to its distributed nature but what good does this do us when the means to exchange bit-coins are still vulnerable. Is it possible to create a marketplace similar to bitmit only protected from government attacks for the same reasons that bitcoin is protected? I am speaking of a decentralized encrypted p2p ebay-esque auction service/marketplace, obviously utilizing bit-coins as the medium of exchange.

It would be simplified by the fact that there would be no need for an escrow service. Buyers would pay up front and be forced to trust sellers. Sellers would be able to generate unique ids. Buyers would apply positive or negative ratings to these ids at the conclusion of a transaction. buyers could look at the history of the sellers id in order to determine his trustworthiness. Important to ensuring the success of such a system would be the option for sellers to state their location and how far they are willing to drive in order to personally deliver a product. Buyers could then filter their search down to only items that are available for personal delivery. In this way it could usurp both ebay and Craigslist in one fell swoop. In order to maintain the integrity of the network sellers could be required to "earn" the right to post auctions by helping to maintain the network.

the only problem i still see is in preventing sellers from using fake transactions to create fake positive ratings for themselves. Hopefully someone smarter than me could figure that one out.

here is a blog where someone described something similar "http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2006/12/14/p2p-to-destroy-ebay-google-yahoo-et-al/"

I dont think such a thing exists yet but is it possible? if it is possible is anyone working on it? if it is possible and no one is working on it is the idea out there? are other people talking about it?