Now I'm no fucking genius and I certainly barely have the balls to partake in this roleplaying subreddit, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on the potential of what I'll call a "perfect market"
Every single bust I've seen has had opsec mistakes and it seems like the people that have the skill and resources to create a truly safe market (if such a thing is possible) aren't getting into the business
If someone were to design a market under circumstances which made it impossible to bust, naturally embracing entirely anonymous currencies, operating with multi sig yada yada
Say said market over an extended period of time clearly got hailed as the king, was built without opportunity for a large scale exit scam, and gained a monopoly on the dark net market
What would the money look like? Ignoring logistics such as needing to launder it and get away with everything, how many millions do the ones of you who are smart fucks predict the people behind such a market could make?
Just another everyday roleplayer contributing don't mind me
Well, I am not sure of the numbers but if you can find some statistics and shit you might start looking at it with the following things in mind...
INITIAL COSTS:
Server setup, provisioning, and all the development necessary - (cost: time and potentially fees if your devs work like that)
Let's throw some PRELAUNCH pen testing in there, for good measure, yea?
Staff costs for paying support desk, admins/moderator salaries, etc.
Backup servers in case of seizures/hardware failure/scaling
Ongoing/Future Costs:
Scaling/Upgrading Server Costs (This will require you to have some statistics for projecting growth and bandwidth/hardware requirements
Staff additions and continual security expenses (ongoing pentesting seems appropriate, additional moderator salaries, loss due to bugs and hacks)
Bitcoin volatility (or altcoin)
Extortion attempts (See AlphaBay)
Lawyers on retainer
Ongoing bugfix/feature development (keeping lead developers on staff may very well be necessary for quick bug fixes, salary for them?)
Laundering crypto to fiat
Now this is just a short list I'd imagine, expenses are never predictable in the real world and going over budget is almost expected in most IT ventures.
I can imagine this will occur AFTER the site goes live, because the expenses prior to launching are mostly tied to server hardware/developers. After launching, though, you then have so many more variables that might play with you.
How do you budget for something like when AlphaBay got social-engineered into paying someone 3BTC or whatever? How can you plan for hardware failure or busts that leave you as the last market standing (Dream, right now, if you can call what Dream is doing standing) or the affect that bad PR will have on your traffic?
What about someone leaving coin abandoned in your markets wallet, and abandoning or losing access to said coin? How can you anticipate whether or not your commission will be split amongst a referral? What about whether or not that referral is withdrawn?
You get the idea...the variables only keep coming and the biggest one of all that could literally ruin a market is BTC volatility.
I could keep going, but I can't stay up role-playing all night :(
Oh, shit. I figured it out! Perfect Market, right?
100%!