Bitcoin Forum

I'd like to propose a P2P yellow pages style business directory.  Let me explain the why and the how.

Why?

I set up bitcoincounsel.com and liked the idea of a central place to go to review the bitcoin ecosystem.  Obviously I got bored of keeping it up to date but thought it would be nice to cooperate with other directory sites to agree and build upon our combined directories.  This could easily be achieved with a simple RPC channel between a few cooperating directery sites but in the spririt of bitcoin I thought a P2P solution would decentralize the thing better and allow everyone to have a copy of the directory on their own hardware.

How?

I think of it as being very similar to GIT.  People make commits to their own repository (directory) which creates a unique hash, nodes can communicate with each other using hashes to determine the changed or not changed state of other nodes.

The repository would simply store textual information, for a directory in would focus on each entity (business, user, whatever) but I guess the system could be used for any simple textual information and not just business listings.

Obviously some nodes/maintainers are not going to agree on a particular change to a business listing (listing been deliberately destroyed or incorrect updates) so some sort of diff tool should be intergrated so maintainers when merging other changesets can include some bits and ignore others.  This will lead to multiple versions of the directory.  Each node should also include how many other nodes are using a particular branch.

As a node operator, I should choose which nodes I want to cooperate with, perhaps giving some readonly access and others confirm before merge and others auto-merge rights. That way if nodes start sending crappy commits I can block them, if they start sending fraudulent branch usage statistics then I can block them etc.

My goal is that hopefully one branch becomes the leading branch in terms of usage and commits etc.  There's not much point creating a competing branch of the directory that less people use, it encourages you to bring your changes inline with what the majority want.  New users coming into the system will straight away see the largest most popular branch and most likely go with that as the standard.

As an added bonus it would be nice if business owners could identify themselves with a signed message or something and inject their own additional information into the listing.  Other nodes would confirm that it was valid and commit it and include it in the chain.  That way businesses can use it to correct or pretty up their own listing.

Anyway, i'm not sure if this would even be doable, i'm sure there are some challenges that I have overlooked.

Thoughts? Would you participate in the network? Is it worth pursuing? Any major hurdles I have over simplified?

So absolutely no interest then :)

This is an attractive plan; my recommendations are to give it more visual points of interest if you choose to go for a full proposition.