RE: direct deals

I really think that until a decentralized market comes along with major innovative enhancements, our best course of action in the interim is to do direct deals on vendor operated sites. There would have to be some kind of an open source forum/directory that allowed discussion of vendors with links to the vendor's store.

I'm not really thinking clearly right now and haven't thought it out much, but I believe that overall a system with many sites, with relative parity among them, would be significantly safer for vendor and buyer alike than our current system where one or two markets dominate the entire economy and thousands of people and million of dollars are, at any given time, at the mercy of maybe a half-dozen site operators. Moreover, vendors have more of an incentive to keep their site running because they will have come away with much less in an exit scam than major market operators and I would think would have higher net profits through running an honest store. LE will also no longer be able to dedicate ridiculous amounts of attention and resources on one single market to completely disrupt the dnm economy. There are obviously glaring drawbacks like the lack of a review system that only allows for authentic buyers to post on, but I think the lowered risk of crippling or expensive attacks on markets (by hackers and LE) because of the sheer quantity and diversity of sites, coupled with the significantly lowered chance of losing your btc in a scam since one operator cannot steal 30% of transactions at one given time (thus reducing the motive for any one to do so, since they would walk away with so much less than Verto & Kimble and maybe now MDParity have).

IDK guys I am very high and just sick of losing money and really intuitively believe that this would be a somewhat safer system in today's darknet ecosystem than what we are currently doing, even though it would feel sketchier and we would be sacrificing a lot of the innovating features that drew so many of us to the DNMs in the first place.

Stay safe & let's try to not lose any BTC this week!

Edit: I think going forward vendors are pretty much going to require FE anyways, so they can pull more or less the same size exit scam with this format as the current. It is really a matter of eliminating the situation in which a few people can take so many people's money with a few clicks. And making life harder for LE.

Edit 2:Okay I know you guys are right, and that was kind of my thought but I was just really stoned when I wrote this and was having trouble communicating and maintaining a consistent idea in my head. But the risk would still be mitigating by splitting the risk. But I guess I am thinking of more of a direct deal situation where a vendor has awebsite, but website is only used to list products, pricing, and contact information. Then purchase like a direct deal. No money on an online wallet other than yours and your vendors. The stores would functionally be informational only. Presently, you kind need to find legit, consistently checked, email or bitmessage address for vendors and you have to go through the motions of finding out product, prices, whether or not they even do direct deals, shipping policy & all profile info, etc, etc. This system would allow you to quickly find out all that information BEFORE contacting the vendor making the process way more efficient and user friendly. Forums would serve as a good jumping off point to find vendor's pages and get buyer input/reviews/warnings, but all the vendors would not lose their pages is that was shut down. New forums could just pop up then. And vendor page attacks would be isolated events, instead of taking tons of vendors offline at once. No risk of market exit scams. Still roughly same risk of vendor exit scams (and vendors I think are just much less likely to exit scam then markets for reasons explained above. Everyone uses PGP and safe mail or message clients and everything is pretty good. It's these market scams that are going to kill this scene and make everythng so god damn expensive and risky for eveyone. LE is also just going to have a lot more trouble I think containing this type of scene.


Comments


[6 Points] daper27:

BTW scammers warmasteryea and moltentorret already pm'd me trying to take advantage of a direct situation, so it would initially have to be limited to trusted vendors large or small that you have used and know, but it wouldn't allow much room for new users, another con and reason it would be temporary.


[4 Points] None:

Everyone, stay tuned for AutismHour's Auspicious Handbook for Finalizing Early

Seriously, though, I think this would make people go the extra mile in terms of researching what the fuck they are doing, in general, since it's more of a "I am dealing directly with this person and I better make sure I don't get fucked", rather than us all being a giant school of fish, depending on what a few reddit posts say as our single source of information and essentially relying on "safety in numbers".


[2 Points] ShulginsCat:

Many cookie-cutter vendor sites is a recipe for disaster. Think about security flaws, learning each one's interface and quirks, having money tied up in several different wallets, having no possibility to do multisig or escrow. All bad.

Direct dealing is the right way to go. But the HS aspect of it is redundant IMO


[2 Points] Lightmang2:

The only problem with this is... a vendor can't just log on to some generic "make your own website" website and create a secure vendor page and be good to go. How are vendors going to make their own websites? How can I trust that each and every one of these vendors will make their databases secure from attacks? We have had markets in the past that have all sorts of security flaws and they have teams of people devoted to that. Being a vendor doesn't make you qualified in information security just like sitting in a garage does not make you a car. That's why I've been sketched out by the few vendors who're already opening their own private shops. This is why I keep hope for Agora. They seem to be one of the few that are truly qualified in OPSEC imo.

On top of that, do we really have an ETA on the TOR issue that is allowing DDOSing of the hidden services? For all we know, it could be a year. How does that solve anyone's problems? I would hate to see everyone have to do things by encrypted emails again, because that is a huge step back for DNMs.