[Proposal] BitFirst.net - P2P bitcoin Marketplace - Buy, Sell, or do Auctions

[ranlo]

While I love the idea of the resolution dispute, what happens if there is no determination as to who is in the right and who is wrong? This has always been a fear of mine, or being proven "wrong" falsely.

Yes this is one of the biggest problem to solve. Both sides have 2 appeals (4 in total). If still 2 vs 2 outcome for Buyer and Seller, then last appeal is final (costs too much time as it can go on forever). Each round of voting will be different people and the number of people can be any amount greater than 1 person. 5 rounds of voting is a lot. Basically trade with your Peers carefully and select your Peers carefully. Put special filters on your trades and weed out the bad apples. The system will be strong with an excellent rating, reputation and filter system. When all goes well, everybody will be happy. If not, then the system can be tweaked based on the BitFirst community.

Would it not be better to have an odd number of votes then (say 5)? This would ensure that there is always one person with more votes than the other. It can still lead to problems, but I think this is a better method than 4 total.

[BitFirst.net]

Would it not be better to have an odd number of votes then (say 5)? This would ensure that there is always one person with more votes than the other. It can still lead to problems, but I think this is a better method than 4 total.

Yes it is 5 in total. Buyer and Seller have 2 appeals each - if it is a tie, then the last appeal (5) will be the decider. A special note is that each round, 1 or more Community Member(s) can check all evidence from Buyer/Seller. The Community members will be an odd number group, and each will have equal voting.

Based on the feedback so far the site is going through a redesign now. The original goal was to complete the mockup of the site as fast as possible and get feedback with the concept, then go back and improve the User Interface. However, the concept will be put aside while site User Interface redesign take priority.

Thanks for the feedback (@siarhei, @ranlo and @JessyMatt). Very much appreciated!

[ranlo]

Would it not be better to have an odd number of votes then (say 5)? This would ensure that there is always one person with more votes than the other. It can still lead to problems, but I think this is a better method than 4 total.

Yes it is 5 in total. Buyer and Seller have 2 appeals each - if it is a tie, then the last appeal (5) will be the decider. A special note is that each round, 1 or more Community Member(s) can check all evidence from Buyer/Seller. The Community members will be an odd number group, and each will have equal voting.

Ah, that should work then. I think it'll be interesting to see how it pans out. At least it helps ensure that each person (assuming they hit the tie) had an equal chance of being sided with.

[kittucrypt]

What do you really mean by 3rd key with the community? For this to work well, the key should probably be with the website and not out in the community.

Hi kittucrypt,
Thanks for the message. All private keys will not be on the BitFirst website itself. They will be on different servers with different domain names, and these will also be client side and server side encrypted, so server will not have access to the private keys. Servers will call one another, so even though Users are on the bitfirst.net site, it can call to different servers with different domain names (so they can access directly with bitfirst.net or the other allocated domain name). So the private keys are in the BitFirst community network of servers (decentralized, distributed and encrypted).
    3rd Party - BitFirst Trusted Community Member
      Community Members will be anonymous to Buyer and Seller
      Only used when Buyer or Seller request Trade Dispute
      3rd Party will find best outcome for Buyer and Seller
      If Buyer or Seller not happy with Trade Dispute outcome, they can request Resolution Dispute
        Resolution Dispute
          More Trusted Community Members will be Called upon
            Community Auditors will investigate both Buyer and Seller
            Additional questions will be requested and Answers should be given
            Community Jury will be called upon to vote
              They can request additional information for Auditors to investigate
              If Buyer or Seller still not happy with outcome
                They can request 1 more group of Community Jury to vote
                Each Buyer and Seller can request 2 Dispute each
                Max dispute for each trade is 4 times
                  If both Buyer and Seller have even outcomes
                  5th Round of voting can be requested and it will be final and binding
                Both Buyer and Seller cannot interact with each other again to prevent future problems
        Verdict by Voting style involving Trusted Community Members [anonymous and binding]

There is an inherent challenge with this approach. The wisdom of crowds is not always right. Trusted accounts can be manipulative or can exercise muscle. Besides, such a method will open the dispute resolution to prejudices and biases of individuals. How can you ensure that they remain cognitive in their decision making?

[BitFirst.net]

There is an inherent challenge with this approach. The wisdom of crowds is not always right. Trusted accounts can be manipulative or can exercise muscle. Besides, such a method will open the dispute resolution to prejudices and biases of individuals. How can you ensure that they remain cognitive in their decision making?

Hi kittucrypt, thank you for the insight and yes, you are correct on all your points.
Re: Wisdom of crowds - Each Voter is its own - they will not see others. That is, the voters will not see other voters and will not see their votes. Outcome will be displayed once votes are all completed. So its the wisdom of the individual and not the crowd in this system.

Re: Trusted accounts can be manipulative or can exercise muscle - True. It will be a random selection of Trusted accounts. Trusted accounts are harder to be manipulative compared to untrusted accounts. Exercise muscle is the whole put as they are trusted. When they break the trust, then they will not be trusted so they loose the privilege of having a strong reputation.

Re: Besides, such a method will open the dispute resolution to prejudices and biases of individuals - If there is a better system, please share. This system is better than trusting 1 company and their employees to do the dispute resolution. There will be bottle necks as too many Employees to pay and fees will increase. Then you do not have to worry about the company having a change of management and being unfair to Buyers/Sellers.

Re: How can you ensure that they remain cognitive in their decision making? - Its up to the BitFirst Community. The better the Members are, the better the Community is, and the more widely used the BitFirst.net Marketplace. The system is there to weed out bad players, so hopefully good players will stay and continue to trade.

[ranlo]

What do you really mean by 3rd key with the community? For this to work well, the key should probably be with the website and not out in the community.

Hi kittucrypt,
Thanks for the message. All private keys will not be on the BitFirst website itself. They will be on different servers with different domain names, and these will also be client side and server side encrypted, so server will not have access to the private keys. Servers will call one another, so even though Users are on the bitfirst.net site, it can call to different servers with different domain names (so they can access directly with bitfirst.net or the other allocated domain name). So the private keys are in the BitFirst community network of servers (decentralized, distributed and encrypted).
    3rd Party - BitFirst Trusted Community Member
      Community Members will be anonymous to Buyer and Seller
      Only used when Buyer or Seller request Trade Dispute
      3rd Party will find best outcome for Buyer and Seller
      If Buyer or Seller not happy with Trade Dispute outcome, they can request Resolution Dispute
        Resolution Dispute
          More Trusted Community Members will be Called upon
            Community Auditors will investigate both Buyer and Seller
            Additional questions will be requested and Answers should be given
            Community Jury will be called upon to vote
              They can request additional information for Auditors to investigate
              If Buyer or Seller still not happy with outcome
                They can request 1 more group of Community Jury to vote
                Each Buyer and Seller can request 2 Dispute each
                Max dispute for each trade is 4 times
                  If both Buyer and Seller have even outcomes
                  5th Round of voting can be requested and it will be final and binding
                Both Buyer and Seller cannot interact with each other again to prevent future problems
        Verdict by Voting style involving Trusted Community Members [anonymous and binding]

There is an inherent challenge with this approach. The wisdom of crowds is not always right. Trusted accounts can be manipulative or can exercise muscle. Besides, such a method will open the dispute resolution to prejudices and biases of individuals. How can you ensure that they remain cognitive in their decision making?

I think when it really comes down to it, at some point someone has to make the decisions. Even when you deal with a credit card company to dispute a charge, you're dealing with different people that have to pick a side. All of them could be manipulated, but at the end of the day there's really no choice but to either accept it or not. The more people there are you deal with, the lesser the chance of manipulation as well.

As for the OP, can you leave the judges anonymous? This would go a long way towards keeping manipulation down. Basically the way I see it, the entire situation should be anonymous for both sides:

*User sees that there is someone judging. They know nothing. You could even name them User/Judge
*Judge sees the user's situation. They can't tell who that person is, they just know them as "User"

This would help a lot.

[BitFirst.net]

As for the OP, can you leave the judges anonymous? This would go a long way towards keeping manipulation down. Basically the way I see it, the entire situation should be anonymous for both sides:

*User sees that there is someone judging. They know nothing. You could even name them User/Judge
*Judge sees the user's situation. They can't tell who that person is, they just know them as "User"

This would help a lot.

*Verdict by Voting style involving Trusted Community Members [anonymous and binding]*
Yes Judges are anonymous - most likely Number ID that changes with each Dispute so nobody can track who they are. Their Reputation/Ratings will show, but ID is anonymous. This prevent the bad players from targeting the Trusted Members of the Community.
User being anonymous would be interesting as you mention. Quite a good idea, thank you. User could be anonymous with only Reputation/Ratings shown with history of trades. I guess the more the dispute increases, the more information can be revealed. You can suggest this feature in the Community Roadmap once the system is Live as it will be a good feature.

Please note that it will not cost anything to go into dispute resolution (prevent rich people vs poor people having access to same service). It will be in the interest of the Trusted Members of the Community to help the system stay healthy as without Buyers and Sellers, they would not be able to trade. This can help keep fees low and help scale up.

[ranlo]

As for the OP, can you leave the judges anonymous? This would go a long way towards keeping manipulation down. Basically the way I see it, the entire situation should be anonymous for both sides:

*User sees that there is someone judging. They know nothing. You could even name them User/Judge
*Judge sees the user's situation. They can't tell who that person is, they just know them as "User"

This would help a lot.

*Verdict by Voting style involving Trusted Community Members [anonymous and binding]*
Yes Judges are anonymous - most likely Number ID that changes with each Dispute so nobody can track who they are. Their Reputation/Ratings will show, but ID is anonymous. This prevent the bad players from targeting the Trusted Members of the Community.
User being anonymous would be interesting as you mention. Quite a good idea, thank you. User could be anonymous with only Reputation/Ratings shown with history of trades. I guess the more the dispute increases, the more information can be revealed. You can suggest this feature in the Community Roadmap once the system is Live as it will be a good feature.

Please note that it will not cost anything to go into dispute resolution (prevent rich people vs poor people having access to same service). It will be in the interest of the Trusted Members of the Community to help the system stay healthy as without Buyers and Sellers, they would not be able to trade. This can help keep fees low and help scale up.

I wasn't even thinking about the judges being able to see the user's past ratings and reputation. To enhance this even more, the judge should be able to see how many times that user has been to arbitration (as the buyer and seller) and how many times they won. If someone has gone 50x and has won all 50x, for example, that's a great sign. Someone who has lost every time may be a bigger issue that needs to be evaluated by admins.

[BitFirst.net]

I wasn't even thinking about the judges being able to see the user's past ratings and reputation. To enhance this even more, the judge should be able to see how many times that user has been to arbitration (as the buyer and seller) and how many times they won. If someone has gone 50x and has won all 50x, for example, that's a great sign. Someone who has lost every time may be a bigger issue that needs to be evaluated by admins.

Yes correct. The Users that go into arbitration all the time and looses all the time will have a bad Rating/Reputation - so I am sure a lot of other Users would have filtered out those bad apples and wont let them buy or see their listings.
Admins - they will not play a big role. It will fall into the hands of Trusted Community Members. This is a Peer to Peer Marketplace, so there is no room for BitFirst to have a big army of Admins as power will concentrate on the Admins, which is not the goal. Removing the bad apples will be another process - maybe you can think of a good system and suggest it after the system goes Live, as removing and preventing bad apples is a good feature to have.

[BitFirst.net]

Redesign of the homepage is done. www.bitfirst.net
Background is grey to prevent brightness, and the main listing is white to attract attention. The text is black to the grey so its not too strong on the eyes, and the white text is not pure white as its too bright.

The page is designed for mobile devices, so everything is bigger than normal, and the width is good too.
The rest of the site will follow this theme.

Thank you for all the feedback so far. Can you please check if this new design is better than the old one, and if anything can be improved?

Thanks.

[ranlo]

Redesign of the homepage is done. www.bitfirst.net
Background is grey to prevent brightness, and the main listing is white to attract attention. The text is black to the grey so its not too strong on the eyes, and the white text is not pure white as its too bright.

The page is designed for mobile devices, so everything is bigger than normal, and the width is good too.
The rest of the site will follow this theme.

Thank you for all the feedback so far. Can you please check if this new design is better than the old one, and if anything can be improved?

Thanks.

I like this layout a lot more, but I really don't like that font. The prices look weird (since the numbers are all different sizes), and categories are a little odd as well for the same reason (although this is livable).

[Coinbuddy]

There are many Bitcoin Marketplace already exist.You wasted your time on it
I really want you to see this post,these are the creative and unique ideas that are remaining

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=627371.0

[BitFirst.net]

I like this layout a lot more, but I really don't like that font. The prices look weird (since the numbers are all different sizes), and categories are a little odd as well for the same reason (although this is livable).

Are you using a windows machine? I've just tested it here and it looks like Linux is loading fine but windows is having a different look - both the font and alignment is off. I'm getting the Developers to fix it now.

Re: Price size changed. Made them same size for the line that it is on. Removed Buy and Bid buttons as it was too messy. Now its a clean look. [Thanks for this feedback].

Re: Categories - The rank of the categories will be smart ranking. Based on popularity. The more popular the Listings are in that category, the higher that category will go up the ranking. So good category will move up and bad ones will fade away. The Category heading will have a link enabled to open the category listing and see everything in A to Z format.

There are many Bitcoin Marketplace already exist...

Hi Coinbuddy, thanks for the comment. We've already got donation to do this proposal and to complete the roadmap with all milestones with time and cost estimates - so it will be done. Having said that, there is no other sites that do HD Wallets, Multisignature, Client and Server side encryption, decentralized, Users have full control of their private keys (and not the site), and best of all, Community driven focused.

Thanks.

[ranlo]

I like this layout a lot more, but I really don't like that font. The prices look weird (since the numbers are all different sizes), and categories are a little odd as well for the same reason (although this is livable).

Are you using a windows machine? I've just tested it here and it looks like Linux is loading fine but windows is having a different look - both the font and alignment is off. I'm getting the Developers to fix it now.

Re: Price size changed. Made them same size for the line that it is on. Removed Buy and Bid buttons as it was too messy. Now its a clean look. [Thanks for this feedback].

Re: Categories - The rank of the categories will be smart ranking. Based on popularity. The more popular the Listings are in that category, the higher that category will go up the ranking. So good category will move up and bad ones will fade away. The Category heading will have a link enabled to open the category listing and see everything in A to Z format.

There are many Bitcoin Marketplace already exist...

Hi Coinbuddy, thanks for the comment. We've already got donation to do this proposal and to complete the roadmap with all milestones with time and cost estimates - so it will be done. Having said that, there is no other sites that do HD Wallets, Multisignature, Client and Server side encryption, decentralized, Users have full control of their private keys (and not the site), and best of all, Community driven focused.

Thanks.

Yeah, I'm on Windows. Feel free to toss over an update when you get this fixed and I'll re-evaluate things and let you know how it looks, .

[kittucrypt]

There are many Bitcoin Marketplace already exist.You wasted your time on it
I really want you to see this post,these are the creative and unique ideas that are remaining

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=627371.0

This is by far the cheapest self plug I have seen. While the OP and other people on this thread are discussing his idea,  you swoop in between saying that this idea has already been implemented? And then when we click on the link, it is to a post by you listing two of your own ideas.

Do you think my misleading people to your post, you can get some attention?

[BitFirst.net]

OP has been edited: To make things more easy to see - Donors are now called Pledges.

[BitFirst.net]

Great article on how a startup became a success:
www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-regulation-lessons-early-days-skype

Regulation is not a given
As a congressman in the US told me one day, something that looks like a duck and quacks like a duck must be treated like a duck. If Skype looked like a phone company and sounded like a phone company, then it must be a phone company. But Skype was never a phone company, and never will be.
There are many technical arguments as to why this was so, but the most relevant here is that Skype was simply a piece of software. It was a piece of software that was developed by a company and released directly to the users.
The users created the network and the existence of Skype as a network was independent of Skype as a company. Skype simply provided a part of the network.

[BitFirst.net]

Redesigned finished for Buy bitcoins here page: www.bitfirst.net/pages/Buy_bitcoins_here
The page as a simple design. Just 1 search bar - searches your country for any Offers to sell bitcoin in your country. Has the Seller's name, feedback/ratings/reputation, website or BitFirst store, Bank name description, Price selling, min and max Sell limits, payment type, and speed of service (48hr and 30 day average time of Seller to finalize trade).
Clicking on the Headers of the column will arrange the column highest to lowest or lowest to highest.

[BitFirst.net]

Sign up page redesigned: www.bitfirst.net/pages/Sign_Up_for_an_Account
User creates a temporary account with email and password.

Clicks sign up now button -  brings the page www.bitfirst.net/pages/Sign_Up_for_an_Account_confirm_email
They log in with the email and password that was just created.

Clicks log in now button - brings page www.bitfirst.net/pages/Sign_Up_for_an_Account_Login_Successful_confirm_email
User needs to verify their email address. A confirmation code gets sent to their email address.

They copy that code to confirm it - clicks confirm code button - brings page www.bitfirst.net/pages/Sign_Up_Confirmed
User creates a unique Login ID and unique Display name (this name is what other Users see when they are in the system).

User clicks save button [AJAX window will display successful or error - if successful redirects to login page www.bitfirst.net/pages/Login
User logs in with their new Login ID and their password.

Any feedback on this process and website User Interface would be greatly appreciated.

[BitFirst.net]

Proposal for Setting 2 Factor Authentication with Google Authenticator is done: www.bitfirst.net/pages/Google_Authenticator_Settings
Feedback on anything missing would be much appreciated.