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February 18, 2018, 09:32:51 AM |
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Recently I’ve been thinking about anonymous and decentralized markets. One of the major problem I see with them is that they do not protect the identities of the parties appropriately; you can hide your ID online with a variety of methods but once you have to delivery a physical good you have to rely on existing package delivery service, which of course require your ID to be disclosed; potential automated or decentralized delivery systems, while continuosly popping up in discussions, seem far off in the future (if they ever materialize).
An interesting solution could be remailing services. You send your package to a dedicated address, inside it there’s the real package ready to ship and a cash fee for the service. I conceived of a decentralized remailing (temporary name BitRemailer) service that improve on existing centralized ones. Different middlemen operates within an area within which goods can circulates easily (ex. Schengen area or mailnland U.S.), the seller send the package to the middleman who sends it to the buyer, the system would be base on decentralized tech like Bitmessage; this protects the ID of the seller, however we can still improve upon it.
We can associate to each middleman a public crypto address. Instead of giving their address to the seller, the buyer gives the seller their physical address encrypted with the public key of their middleman of choice. The seller then provides the encrypted (physical) address with the package, the middleman can decrypt it and send it to the buyer.
This system should provide decent ID protection to both seller and buyer; unlike other futuristic approaches, such a system should also be relatively easy to kickstart, all it needs is a site to list middlemen and their addresses (and fees). If it takes off additional services could be provided, for example middlemen could provide intercontinental delivery by signing up to existing package forwarding businesses and so on.
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