The words "decentralized market" have been thrown around a lot, but not much has been provided as to concrete designs. I believe I have a vague idea as to a workable design, but I'd appreciate some input. I don't have much coding experience.
As we know, determining whether or not a vendor is a scammer is a crapshoot at best, even with human intervention and judgement. Vendors can easily fake tracking information, and furthermore, tracking drug packages, especially when they may have been seized, creates a security vulnerability. Usually, vendors live or die by feedback. Consequently, the majority of scams are either exit scams or selective scams. Selective scams work because buyers are afraid to leave negative feedback, as a vendor may threaten to dox or leave a low buyer rating. Exit scams work because the threat of market theft/hacking and bitcoin volatility provide a rationale to require early finalization, and the profits of a scam may outweigh those of legitimate sales given the vast difference in profit margin. My design aims to combat these scams without the risk of coin theft and without human intervention.
First, each vendor possesses an "active wallet." This is a multi-signature wallet which contains all coins in pending transactions. However, the escrow agent, instead of a human, is a bot, which makes decisions based on the "scam probability" criterion.
On the decentralized system, there exist multiple sources of data with which a bot can make a decision. These include:
- The outcomes, values, and number of trades by the buyer or vendor.
- The typical shipping time as specified by a vendor
- Whether a buyer has simply not responded or is actively disputing (notice of no receipt vs. just no response from the buyer)
- What other buyers are doing
- Whether a vendor requests a release of funds for a given transaction
In response to these pieces of information, the bot can make the following decisions
- Release coins to buyer
- Release coins to vendor
- Wait
As to the means of verifying the integrity of the bot or the mathematical means of calculation, I will say that both aspects are feasible but require a lot of analysis. But if such a project became open source, and say provided statistical details for a given vendor wallet, along with a way to link the wallet to a database of vendor-provided database information broadcasted publicly and immediately without censorship, it seems possible to have an open-source and decentralized market.
Any ideas? Criticism?
Additional ideas/details (criticism needed):
Terms of service, and if a buyer detects a violation (dox etc.) it gets broadcast and the bot can decide whether or not to ban
Giving a "donation" to the service changes the bot calculation. In other words, the more of a bond that's paid, the more likely that a judgement will favor a vendor
Each transaction for a given vendor is signed by the vendor to prove integrity
Buyers can broadcast comments of any (reasonable) length and provide whatever details they feel are safe. If a buyer doesn't want to say that they received 10 grams of LSD but they'd like to say that it was a legitimate transaction and good-quality LSD, they can
Buyer broadcasted information/reports carry a weight based on buyer details
Bots can detect suspicious buyers that seem to be owned by vendors and acting manipulatively based on behavior detection
Under any case, buyers are free to disregard the bot and transact however they want; since it's multisignature, if the buyer releases and the vendor accepts, the transaction will go through.
Giving a "donation" to the service changes the bot calculation. In other words, the more of a bond that's paid, the more likely that a judgement will favor a vendor
This sounds like a vendor paying a high bond could scam and the bot will support them.