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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>EDIT: also check out the bitcoin-otc web of trust.
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>x</i>% 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Hi. I've been working on a system very similar to OPs description for months now -- <a href="http://portobello-road.org" rel="nofollow">http://portobello-road.org</a> . 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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>It was/is possible on the platforms mentioned above; I don't imagine it more difficult in a anonymous market.<p>Looking forward to their results and insights to this.
There is a project called BitMarket that runs a market on the bitmessage platform, really neat.<p><a href="https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AyrA/BitMarket</a><p><a href="https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0" rel="nofollow">https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=3549.0</a>
> * Are there any similar attempts we can contribute to or borrow ideas from instead of implementing something on our own?<p>RetroShare could be used as a platform for this, given that it's:<p>- 100% Decentralized<p>- Public key encrypted<p>- Open source<p>...and accepts plug-ins for new features. See: <a href="http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/</a>
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 <a href="https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.0" rel="nofollow">https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=1666.0</a>
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.<p>Strange that we seem to have to keep trying to get back to where we started.
People are mentioning the need for reviews in such a marketplace. I present one possible solution:<p>> Users pay some fee to leave reviews. the more they pay the more the review is weighted.<p>> Buyers can rate the reviews on how helpful they are.<p>> 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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin</a>
I've written a description for the potential implementation of a decentralized pseudonymous marketplace. I would appreciate any critical analysis of it.<p><a href="https://github.com/lapp0/Smart-Market" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lapp0/Smart-Market</a>
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.
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).
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.
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.