More concrete plans for a new kind of distributed market

I've posted before about a new concept for a darknet market, to distribute responsibility for both hosting and administration to a closed, mutually anonymous and untrusting group of owners. The original post was long, but basically:

All this gets enforced cryptographically---so Bitcoin is to USD as this market is to AMZN, if you want. This is different from existing decentralized markets, which still require individual people or entities to take the notary role filled here by a shareholder vote.

I've now written a more concrete description of how the system would work. I ask:

At this moment, we're looking for expressions of interest (here or by private message) only. We haven't yet decided whether to actually start writing code, and your feedback will help us with that.

All other comments welcome too, especially on the technical details. The shareholding concept is interesting to me---so I hope this motivates some discussion of that, regardless of whether we're the first ones to do it for real.


Comments


[11 Points] despropion:

I don't know if you're aware, but some people are already working on projects like this. There are:

&


[6 Points] sapiophile:

  1. Make a very complete Design Document before you write your first lines of code. Build your code to the Design Document, at every step of the way. Check out the Tor Design Document to see this done Right.

  2. Write all your code test-forward, make everything testable and tested.

  3. Use existing, reviewed cryptographic libraries. Lots of exciting libs from Daniel Bernstein, these days... Don't roll your own crypto unless you really, really have to (and you almost certainly don't).

  4. Research and plagiarize all you can. Jumping off points: the projects /u/despropion mentioned, plus... Tahoe-LAFS, I2P, POND, I2P-Bote, BitAlias/BlockStore/DNSChain, GNU Name System (GNS), Axis Mundi, Syndie, FreeNet, GNUnet, the Shadow Project, TextSecure (or just Axolotl Ratcheting in general), LookingGlass, VaporMaidSafe, BitShares, Ethereum, Counterparty, SecureShare, BitRated, Storj, ZeroNet, Colored Coins (various implementations), ...

  5. Note that by dividing shares of the enterprise up, you are essentially creating an altcoin. That is not necessarily bad, but there is a lot of stigma (and a lot of historical failure) associated with that kind of paradigm. Colored Coins may be a more favorable alternative, but are extremely new...

  6. Extremely open licensing - probably BSD or MIT, or GPLv2. Or WTF.

  7. This is an extremely big and ambitious project. Be aware of that, plan for that, get a team involved as early as you can.

  8. On that note, though, seriously - re-use as much as you can. Most of the bits and pieces of this thing are already built.

  9. Don't fucking burn out. Practice good self-care.

  10. Don't become obsessed with fundraising. Don't expect to get paid for a long, long time. The more importance you put on funding, the shittier your project becomes.

  11. Deterministic builds.

  12. Every source and binary release gets a GPG signature. Ideally, individual git commits are signed. Distribution via HTTPS, torrent, and more interesting protocols a big plus.

  13. Talk to other people in the field. Check out the upcoming Real World Crypto conference in Stanford, 32C3, etc.... Join some mailing lists - cypherpunks, Modern Crypto, sci.crypt, tor-*, etc.

  14. Lurk a lot.

  15. Don't fuck up the Key Trust aspect. Lots of people gloss over this part. It's a hard problem to solve, but some of the names I dropped above are pretty clever about it... It's also essential for reputation.

  16. Be careful about forming a committee at odds with itself, in the form of your "shareholders". Learn from the ongoing Bitcoin blocksize debate, etc.

  17. Don't skimp on UX... eventually. It's hard enough just getting people here to use Tails, ffs.

  18. For fuck's sake, keep it the hell out of the browser. WebUIs to internal services are generally okay, though (like how I2P does it - although this did open up their only real recent vuln a year or two ago).

I dunno, I think that covers a lot. Good luck.

EDIT: Other stuff to look into:

  1. Nash equilibrium for scam prevention...

  2. Have bounties and bug bounties, as soon as you can.


[2 Points] Trappy_Pandora:

Good luck!


[1 Points] the-scary-mary:

Any minority of the owners can become malicious, and nothing bad happens. Commission is paid to the owners in proportion to their stake, like a dividend. Owners can sell their shares in the market to other people. The market is managed by whoever the owners select with a majority vote.

This looks quite well thought out but I worry because it sounds like the majority shareholders control the market and if they decide to leave, die, get sick, get arrested etc the whole market goes with them.

Is that correct, if one person (say you) is the majority shareholder you could just turn the market off? Even if the majority shareholders represent a small proportion of the market?

Dont get me wrong because it sounds interesting but it also sounds like you havent distributed/decentralised some of the bits that really should be decentralised and have basically introduced a kill switch which in decentralised systems like the one you propose is not ideal.

It feels like youre creating a huge achillies heel in the system to keep control/manage of the market. I understand that you want to get some return on your investment though so I get it.

It seems to work OK in projects like Tor where you have 8 or 9 people/groups effectively overseeing the system so maybe it could still work well. the big difference with Tor project though is that the directory authority operators are all publicly known and open to direct IRL scrutiny.

I'm a big fan of using at-risk-deposits (not quite mutually assured destruction though as typically sellers have more cash than buyers) to enforce a nash equilibrium between non-trusted buyer and non-trusted seller. The notary idea is OK too as long as there is a good market for notaries and a good incentive for notaries to behave.


[1 Points] 2005C:

Get a pal who can do basic graphics, make a diagram and a flow chart.


[1 Points] LedLevee:

What prevents someone from buying a fuckton of shares under shell accounts?