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:
- Servers can get seized, and nothing bad happens.
- 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.
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:
- If you're a seller, would you test an early version of the software?
- The benefit to you is a market that provably can't steal your funds, and that if it reaches a critical mass might be practically impossible to shut down. If you have a strong established reputation, then we could also offer a small (~1%) stake in the market.
- The cost is the time you'd waste dealing with our dodgy beta software, and the (hopefully, slight) chance that we'd screw something up in a way that cost you money...
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.
I don't know if you're aware, but some people are already working on projects like this. There are:
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