Someone proposed this in /r/Bitcoin yesterday. Death of darknet markets as we know them?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ryf4z/cryptoanarchy_round_two_fully_decentralized_free/

This is pretty interesting.


Comments


[4 Points] kenosian:

I kind of like how they say this is not for 'drug markets', but the only reason you need escrow is because we need anonimity. Both in currency and in identity. I don't need escrow when I'm using my credit card, because I am insured. The seller doesn't require it because he has my identity. So while I approve, to say it's not for illegal/underground markets is just a bit misleading.

In regards to the satement in the title: dark markets still serve as a platform for building and giving trust. I can trust a vendor because he has had positive feedback from other sales. A vendor can trust a buyer because the buyer has had successful transactions with other vendors. This trust is isolated to a specific dark market (though some of the bigger vendors have name recognition) and is their unique selling point.

What we really need (apart from escrow not being with the market) is trust to be decoupled from the market medium. Instead, feedback for transactions should be recorded on a tertiary site (and be made available for full download) through an API (so all markets can plug into it) and webbrowsing. Buyers and sellers sign transactions with their private keys and the tertiary site verifies it using their public key. This could also work in a p2p model where a transaction would also be signed by the market the transaction occured on. This would eliminate abuse since you'd configure your client/market to only accept transactions from reputable markets.

Markets can then differentiate not so much in building trust, but in having good features, offering security and competitive percentages. However, it is not in the interest of the markets to do this since it would offer newcomers all the trust they painstakingly built up. Then and only then will darkmarkets be truly changed.

Note to LE: Great idea right? If anyone ever builds it. I didn't do it! I could, but I'm lazy and also I'm not really all that good a coder :p


[1 Points] crazygenius:

Hopefully we see something like this come about in the next 6 months, seems like instead of being the 'ebay' for drugs, it would simply be the bitcoin ebay


[1 Points] None:

Sounds interesting to me, I will keep an eye on that. Thanks for posting!


[1 Points] reaperx2:

How will this be the death of blackmarkets? It sounds kind of like legal SR with a decentralized escrow.