Bitcoin Forum

For the sake of discussion, let's use NXT.

Would the Mexican - South American drug cartels benefit from using NXT's mixing service + other features if it were to utilize the platform for moving money?  And possibly encourage its network of retail dealers to use the NXT market place, starting a market place for selling drugs online?

I've always wondered about that...

What is with this version 2.0 crypto jargon you guys keep posting about ?
Was there some official road map where we had an update to the Altcoin scene or something ?
jeez, i have been doing this so long i think you should be calling it version 9.0 by now..
ohh noobs  ::)

When most of you here hanging around *still got here (just after when BTC went up to 1k per coin)
THAT is when you should have called them 2.0 coins (or am i missing some criteria ?)
Because back then is when the 2nd wave of coins exploded onto the scene..

Right.  Sorry about that, I'm just a small time trader, not a coder like you.  So I'm gonna get some technical stuff wrong.  But you get the point.

That's not the point.  What I'm asking is more like is it practical for NXT to be used by, in this example, a drug cartel to move money, and use its decentralized market place to sell drugs online?

What do you guys think?

Good question, Toke.

The Nxt community spent (as usual) about 3 months arguing about whether appealing to 'dark markets' was a good thing or not.
Like it or not, dark markets were one of the main driving forces for BTC use and adoption, and are still one of the few completely solid usecases for crypto-currency.
The community feelings ran pretty high, but the consensus standpoint is that Nxt does not wish to support or endorse any illegal activity.

Getting specific on NXT functionality: yes,it is practical for a drug cartel to use NXT to sell and distribute their products, just like any legitimate business could.
Nxt has a native marketplace, and at least one good third party market app: FreeMarket.
Transactions on both can be completely anonymous and untraceable to a specific person, if they take basic precautions.
As a distro channel for naughty things, Nxt makes a lot of sense.

On moving/storing large quantities of cash:  Nxt uses a brainwallet system, there are no local wallet files stored on a machine running Nxt.
This lack of a wallet could make life hard for any law enforcement agency who tries to seize NXT funds, and means that someone can carry large amounts of NXT stored in their brain, provided thay can commit their passphrase to memory.

There are a couple of issues, though, from the bad boy POV:
Nxt has a total market cap of just over $7,000,000 right now ( :'(), and is , like all alts, still fairly illiquid.
Quickly transferring big piles of cash via Nxt, in the current market situation, won't be easy.

Nxt (like most crypto) is also completely transparent: all transactions can be traced. When it comes to genuine untraceability, paper money wins hands down.
The on/off ramps for NXT<>fiat are also a sticking point: if our hypothetical cartel is happy to hold only Nxt or other crypto-currencies, no problem, but if they want to convert Nxt to actual fiat, the on/off ramps are the obvious place for law enforcement to bust them.

The mixing service (Coin Shuffling) will be coming up with the following Nxt release, so lets see if the global drugs trade jumps onto Nxt then.
I don't think they will, and i'd prefer if they didn't........but who knows.

Summing it up: I can see a good usecase for Nxt as a dark market sales platform, but most of the Nxt community does not want to see dark market adoption.

Thanks for the reply Dave.  So NXT is ready for real world, practical use.  

Is the market place like Open Bazaar?  How does your escrow method work?  And how many people are using it?

There is a comparison thread of various marketplace projects somewhere, but I'm damned if I can find it......just to be confusing, Nxt has two marketplaces, one built into Nxt core (Marketplace), and one  external project (FreeMarket).

Anyway, on the native Nxt marketplace, here's a screeny of the Marketplace from today :
http://i59.tinypic.com/15338mc.jpg

And here's the Wiki entry:
https://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Marketplace

So, yeah, thats all good to go. I've used the Marketplace myself for about 5 or 6 sales, and one purchase.

Toke, answering your questions in reverse order:
Not enough people are using it. After the great 'dark market' debate within Nxt, it kind of got shoved under the carpet.
So badly shoved under the carpet that it's not even mentioned in the Nxt Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nxt
Ooops....

Escrow is pretty basic: if you make a purchase, your funds are held until the seller confirms delivery/despatch. If the seller fails to confirm, you get refunded.
As all sellers are linked to Nxt accounts, the reputation of a bad seller will quickly get burned if she/he failed to deliver, and the (planned) reputation system would add further pressure on sellers to build up and maintain a solid reputation.

OpenBazaar is more like Nxt FreeMarket, which is a third party marketplace app (using Nxt messaging, strangely).
Here's a couple of FreeMarket info links:
http://nxtfreemarket.com/
https://nxtforum.org/nxtventures/freemarket-official-thread/
Lite version:
https://freemarketlite.cc/

FreeMarket development has been slow lately, but 1.5 should be turning up soon.
Any specific questions about FreeMarket, I'll kick over to the FM devs....

toke i didn't mean to attack you eh..
my point was that a new crypto term has sprung up out of nowhere you guys are using (that i don't get/understand)

i started using the word "scene" for altcoins when i started here way back and i got flamed for it..
it caught on later.. now you all say it LOL

[pitch mode]
A second generation crypto-currency is one which builds further native features onto its blockchain, above and beyond the basic storage/transfer functionality of Bitcoin
[/pitch mode]

Usually, this extra functionality is in the form of the creation and trading of subsidiary tokens (coins) which can be used to represent assets or pretty much anything else the creator of the token wishes. You'll also see DNS systems, decentralised storage, marketplaces, messaging systems, plug-in containers, and all kinds of other shiny toys included as part of the basic blockchain client.

Nxt, Counterparty, BitShares, Ethereum, MasterCoin and Maidsafe are pretty much the top of the Gen 2.0/Bitcoin 2.0 crowd.

No no.  No offense taken.  :)

I'll have a look at NXT when I get back home.

Thanks EvilDave that was well said.
I see i was off base a bit on that i guess (what i thought it meant kind of)

I've used FreeMarket and Nxt Marketplace and have been extremely satisfied with both.

I wish more people would try it out, as Nxt clearly provides a superior platform in virtually every way to Bitcoin.

However, I am convinced this will not happen without an extreme uptick in Nxt marketing. Hopefully projects like Tennessee will do well!

BTC maximalists are content waiting for OpenBazaar when I've been buying/selling physical goods on Freemarket since September 2014.

There's also BitMarkets.  It has a better escrow system imho.

Check it out:  https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/

Read page 6 for its escrow system:  https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/slides/Bitmarkets.pdf

This is technically good solution but will not have adoption in the real world. Buyers do not want to pay collateral to purchase something and sellers will need to lock sufficient amount of funds when actively trading. Also seller can take buyer's collateral as hostage and force buyer to give positive rating/agree on product delivery.
FreeMarket introduced Concorde escrow system. It is not trustless (escrow agent can run away with deposits) but it is more adapted to the real world applications.

shh don't tell DASH
but if they are sincere then they best take some of that capital ... and network with Monero, SDC, Anon, VNL, and whoever else and create the superNet of BlackMarkets 2.0 platform.

EvilDave and blackyblack already explained the current situation but let's not forget what's in the pipeline: the SuperNet (http://www.supernet.org/index.php) project is going to be a turning point for such markets too.

1. SN offers very advanced privacy features based on Bitcoindark
2. SN offers a lot of services, including some like PAX (the pegged asset exchange) or Pangea poker that will attract a lot of new money and greatly improve liquidity of all coins. Just think about all remittance services startup based on Btc, if they have any common sense they'll switch to Pax.

Nxt and Btcd, of course, take the lion's share of the new liquidity but all other coins will benefit from this. Since Freemarket will be integrated into SN, it will enjoy the greatly improved liquidity and privacy, so cashing out millions anonimously isn't unthinkable in a few years.

IMHO

They can use NXT market place however they may just accept BTC still after all BTC is widely use.

If Nxt allows that it will be target of goverment, Or not?    The same to anothers platforms.......

why i suggest the ANONs build such a platform
they already enter 'those' waters

I don't think so. Nxt doesn't have nearly enough volume to handle that large of an organization. None of the privacy-focused cryptocoins have the volume to move that much capital at this point in the game. Nxt isn't very anonymous either from what I understand... seems like a bad place to set up shop. Also, Nxt is apparently focusing on legal businesses.

NXT be wise to play dumb.  No see.  No speak.  Even if there is some success in that area.  Best to keep clean hands.

"High level anonymous" platform ... be interesting if the ANONs could partner on such a project.