Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: datalore on October 05, 2013, 06:27 am
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I'm probably not the only person on here that's not ready to trust another .onion marketplace for a while. What if we had a system similar to the bitcoin-OTC web of trust.(clearnet: http://bitcoin-otc.com/trust.php)
A basic example on how this would work: A website frontend (perhaps on both TOR and I2P), with a semi-public database of the web of trust. The site could show vendor names, PGP and contact information and feedback, and perhaps items for sale, or vendors could host their own sales website, using PGP for verification. Escrow could be provided as a service in itself either by individual OTC users or by an entitiy like BMR or Sheep, although escrow becomes less needed as vendors are better established it should always be available for newcommers. All transaction details would be worked out in PGP, vendors wishing to maintain high security could even keep prices and anything more then the most basic details off public onion sites and only publish by email, bitmessage or some other encrypted means. The web of trust could be as simple as running a PGP keyserver and a basic web frontend, multiple mirrors could be setup if needed, and the majority of the communications would only pass as encrypted messages between vendor and buyer.
TorATM is a sort of basic example of the sort of marketplace I think could be developed this way, but we need something with an open source backend that any vendor could deploy, perhaps such a system could even be deployed in parallel with sites like sheep and BMR.
The primary benefit i see to an open system like this is that even if the system itself where being run by law enforcement, the users would be able to conduct business securely and outside of the control of the primary site.
Thoughts anyone? Maybe I'm overlooking something, but this doesn't seem to be the direction either of the current (or past) marketplaces seem to be going.
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You have to authenticate with gribble before any trading on bitcoin-otc. By running a website front end, anybody can impersonate them. Running a F/T IRC drug trading room is an insane idea btw, IRC is not safe for anonymity at all it's real-time communication I fear most vendors would be busted, plus easily unmasked through malicious DCC social engineering.
Having a lot of people doing escrow is a good idea instead of one centralized point of failure.
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You have to authenticate with gribble before any trading on bitcoin-otc. By running a website front end, anybody can impersonate them. Running a F/T IRC drug trading room is an insane idea btw, IRC is not safe for anonymity at all it's real-time communication I fear most vendors would be busted, plus easily unmasked through malicious DCC social engineering.
Having a lot of people doing escrow is a good idea instead of one centralized point of failure.
I don't think the IRC aspect of the bitcoin-OTC would be a good idea for a SR type market either, instead of an IRC bot, it could use a somewhat centralized (but mirrorable) PGP keyserver. I'm not knowledegable enough to do it myself, but there must be a number of ways to run a sort of reputation tracking system publicly (well, public on the deep web), without tying any other aspects to it. I use PGP as an example because we've already seen it being used by vendors to prove who they are on other marketplaces.