Bitcoin Forum

OK, just an idea I'm throwing out there.

Would people want a p2p version of eBay that uses bitcoins for payment and is based on web of trust with buyer seller ratings etc.

I realise there would be problems without being able to roll-back transactions, but would people be willing to risk this in order to cut out the middleman?

Though I don't use eBay much myself, I think this is a great idea (especially if you can make it use a two party escrow system for the payment).

already posted few times, hope this idea gets some more attention though



Blockchain-based web of trust
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50485

How about a real (p2p)Market software based on it's own blockchain?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50566.0

Although the other two posts are very similar they both use block chains. I don't see why you need block chains for a web of trust.

This is what I propose for rating other account;

Each peer has one or more accounts;

Each account has a list of info about other accounts including ratings and comments.

Account rating is determined by spidering the other accounts on the network, and calculate the rating in much the same way google calculates pagerank. 

So if someone else’s account has given you a bad rating, it wouldn’t carry much weight unless their account had a good rating itself.

where would you store all the info needed to make it to work ?

If you mean where is all the info regarding items for sale then there are two ways of doing this, as far as I can see.

First is the simple way. When you want to sell something you add that item to your offer database which is stored locally.   You receive search queries from other peers and return them any relevant offers. When you want to buy something then you send out a search across the network and you get all the relevant results returned from the other peers.

The downside of this method is that you can’t sell anything unless your client is connected.

The second way is to use a distributed database but this is more complicated and would probable be overkill for a first prototype. But, it would not be necessary to keep historical data after exchange has been completed, and so, no need for it to be incorporated into a block chain.

When you have someone give you a review they sign it with their key. You can give that to any prospective trading partner. You can hold/host it, but if you ever alter it one bit the sig won't be valid.

Before you do business you look either for someone you know who did business with them or someone who is trusted by someone you trust.

agree with you on the local storage of your items for sale, downside included

what about the trusted otc data on peers, secure time-stamp messaging, fingerprints of PGP pub keys and other things i cannot think of right now. Dunno maybe we could come with a better idea that Satoshi already did, you start the brainstorming... :)

I have been looking through the bitcoin source code and I think the stuff Satoshi wrote for all these things would be good for our purpose.

...

One possible solution for transactions.

When someone accepts your offer it would be removed from your database, so no one else can accept it. Then open a chat channel between buyer and seller. Buyer can then send their delivery address to seller, seller give btc(alt-coin or whatever) payment address to buyer, and utilise existing coin client.

To make an auction system work you need a few things:

First, there needs to be a fair cost.  Make it totally free and yes you get a bump in traffic, but a ton of junk listings.  You do not want that.  Make listings cost 10 cents.  (1 cent to 25 cents??) You also get people scamming by just creating fake listings and selling (not really selling just saying so) them to themselves and giving good feedback to multiply accounts owned by one person.

You should charge a 1% (.1 - 2%?) final value fee.  You need to make money to keep the site running.  This fee also dissuades scammers.  Most real sellers do not mind paying 1% to someone who gives them a good service.

If you make it too expensive, no one will use it.

Second, you should be involved in the payments.  It is harder to do, but it also dissuades scammers.  You should recieve the BTC, and REQUIRE a tracking #.  Check the tracking # for travel and matching the zip codes of the buyer and seller.  This is also hard.  But can be done manually at least initially.  Release money on the delivery of the item.  It is not a perfect system.  It can be scammed.  But it is much better for both buyer and seller then what is out there in the BitCoin world.  

Then you need a feedback system.  Something like ebay used to be, with negative and positive available to buyer and seller.  

You can't make everyone happy.  People with virtual items, or say that they do not want to give out that much information will not like it.  But long term I think honest buyers and sellers would like it.  



 

man this is though...

@Littleshop  i quit reading from

Who would be "you" ? can you explain... ?

So are there any other developers willing to work with me on this, as part of a collaborative effort?

Smells like the fed to me.  Taxes, regulation, and they'll even hold your money for you.  What a great centralized solution to my decentralized currency!   

What server? I don’t remember mentioning a server.

How it works is by querying your already trusted nodes, you do not query the target node.

What is returned by the nodes is a tree, the root of that tree is the node being queried and each leaf of that tree is a node that has rating and comments about target node.

The relevance of that tree is factored by how much you trust the node that returned it.

This would need to be addressed.

As you do not query the target, pointing to themselves would not get them anywhere. They would need several good paths from you to them thought a network of already trusted nodes.

Sellers trying to establish a good rating can state escrow as one of their accepted payment methods.

I keep thinking that the infrastructure for this is already in place and that it just needs to be used.

An eepsite centralised but can host databases.
I don't think Freenet can host dynamic content?

What about something simpler? Can pgp keys, or a hash, be commented into the comments field in Bitcoin?

What about hosting a directory of files on a p2p network and going from there? -but how do you group a series of files that store pgp keys and transactions?

I think it makes sense to use the Bitcoin blockchain as identification because PGP is an additional step that I think would sink any attempts to make such a thing widely used.

a simple decentralized OTC will do. Should have the ability to store nick,pub key fingerprint and rating for every person and listings of goods and services. OTC market works letting every one give ratings from -10 to +10, where -10 is a scammer and +10 close friend.
The hard work would be on the GUI, to achieve a nice user experience, having to make at the same time sorting and filtering on the blockchain of huge amounts of info.

You know, I’m starting to get the impression that the thinking around here is a little, shall I say, blockchain centric.


Absolutely under no circumstance should this system rely on any centralized service.


Encryption would be transparent to the user.


I have many years of programming experience using wxWidgets (among others).

Good post.

Seriously, what is the deal with everything needing to be p2p? The currency is, that solves most of the issues. Ebay is popular because it works well and is a great system for auctions. What does negative feedback accomplish when all you have to do is create a new "account" with some ridiculous p2p system that has all sorts of ways to be gamed? Every single aspect of life cannot be anonymous and decentralized. sheesh.

Agreed, I think a Bitcoin auction site might need to have at least a centralized aspect to deal with spam, escrow and gaming of the rep system. Check out my sig - I'm working on this and interested in connecting with collaborators.

i appreciate all the answers you give yogi, as you observed our opinions are biased around a blockchain for various reasons... it's novelty and potential.
Any programmer can come grab the code and build on it, just like another forum member said, think at bitcoin protocol as a base for future projects. Can't remember his name.
I'm more like a hardware guy so i feel like shit not having the ability to code. You know how to do it go ahead, you will have our support. I can do translations, small user tweaks, graphics, user support, whatever  :D

edit: i will be the first to donate some btc to whoever pulls out an alpha of this p2pBay style market

True. Plus, it seems people here are not assessing priorities in a good way. There's no big issue with current e-bay-like markets. The biggest priority is exchanging bitcoin <-> fiat anonymously, IMHO.

If you want to dedicate hard work towards something, I'd say building a more anonymous and/or decentralized money exchange is where you should focus. There are some interesting ideas around here, like this (http://bitcoinweekly.com/articles/anonymous-money-needs-an-anonymous-exchange) and this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27055.msg584821#msg584821), but all them need someone willing to do the hard work and to take the inherent risks, obviously.

same thing i'm proposing only use the same "wheel" not reinvent it, satoshi already did  :D