The future of Dark Markets

I predict by 2016 there will be a tor/i2p-integrated, bitcoin-integrated peer-to-peer market application.

Something like emule except browsable categories.

Notification of all listings, sales, feedback, etc will work in a similar way to bitcoin with replication to peers connected or when they reconnect like bitcoin updating if you haven't started it for a while.

No centralised server required, distributed encrypted database where all active listings, feedback, transactions, etc are replicated amongst all peers. Connect when your PC starts and it will check its cache of known clients and initiate communications with each of them. It will first send your public PGP key to them and their clients will challenge your client with a random math problem like 93213665 * 324733245 =? encrypted with your pgp key, your client can decrypt it with your private key and respond to the challenge with the correct answer to the question you are authenticated as being you. Nobody can impersonate you without your private key as they would not be able to decrypt the math problem.

Once authenticated their client will send you their cache of peers and you will start the same authentication with each peer you connect. This should be a fairly fast process as its just 3 packets to authenticate you with each peer you are made aware of from downloading other peoples peer lists.

It will have an integrated bitcoin client for holding your funds. You will be able to create ad-hoc addresses like any bitcoin client. This is really easy since the client is open source.

On install you give it your public PGP key and all communications are automatically encrypted so it doesnt matter that they are sent to all peers. Communications automatically expire after 7 days and are purged from the local db and replicated out of existence.

All payments will go to a bitcoin address owned by the developer team as escrow. It will remain here for 30 days when it will be automatically released or if the authenticated client who made the purchase marks the item as received. A percentage will be retained by the team who developed it as their fee the same as the current markets. There will be a dispute button which if pressed by the authenticated client who made the purchase will stop the automatic escrow release. It will be up to the team to decide who to release the bitcoins to like current markets.

I have only thought about it for about half an hour so there will be flaws but I don't think any would be insurmountable with a bit of thought and some excellent Cryptography/Bitcoin/networking/coding skills.


Comments


[1 Points] Orgonomics:

I like everything about this, except for maybe the last part.

I don't know why, but I see the future as being completely decentralized and distributed; although, how that would be implemented is beyond me.

All of these markets:

To me now they seem like an ever growing framework for a hierarchy of distributed, anonymous, fast, free template markets, interconnected under a single roof that is decentralized by nature and works to keep coherence within its bough and uphold the standards set by the network.