In light of the recent atrocious theft that has been occurring on the darknet, I thought, why not minimalize the "lack of trust" that is apparent within the darknetmarket community. Admins run off with coins held in centralized escrow, vendors lose all their money, customers/buyers lose all their money. So, I propose something that would eliminate the total loss that vendors and customers would fare should thefts like that happen again.
System:
The use of paying out dividends to fuctioning/reputable vendors The criteria would be decided upon by the community and owners of the specific market that implemented such a thing like this, but it ultimately would do these things
- Give Vendors a moneymaking opportunity for being generally good people
- Provide a stable "decentralized" ecosystem within the darknetmarket where each portion of the users benefit the other
- Create a sense of trust within the community, both financially and socially
The "stumble blocks" arise in the situation of what % of profits to give to vendors in dividends. That's where I propose the system of "levels", where vendors who are on the lowest level get the least amount of coins payed out to them weekly or monthly, or even daily. The ideal system of payment could be
- Level 0 Vendors(Those who just joined or haven't bought/sold (x) amount of items): Dividend reward is 0%
- Level 1 Vendors(Those who have bought/sold (x) amount of items and have been on the market for (x) amount of time)): Dividend reward is 0.25% of total site income for (x) amount of time(Daily, Weekly, Monthly)
- Level 2 Vendors(Same Desc. as Level 1): Dividend reward is 0.3% of total site income for (x) amount of time(Daily, Weekly, Monthly)
- Level 3 Vendors(Same Desc. as Level 1/2): Dividend reward is 0.5% of total site income for (x) amount of time(Daily, Weekly, Monthly)
And etc(You can optionally include however many more levels you like with their respective payouts, or tailor the above levels and payouts to your liking)
Currency used
Next, would be the issue of transparency. Such a system as this would require customized mixers or tumblers, all of which utilize coinjoin and are potentially able to be retraced, along with the tracking of ip address associated to bitcoin addy's through the creation of bitcoin nodes(Chainanaylsis). A good read about this would be here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/09/05/follow-the-bitcoins-how-we-got-busted-buying-drugs-on-silk-roads-black-market/ Given that, I've taken into consideration some other user's posts about "alternative" currencies. Since I don't take what others say for granted, I decided to do my little own discovery searching. I came across a wide variety of "alternative currencies" that utilize Bitcoin's coinjoin or that offer some sort of anon scheme. To my dismay, the lot of them are taken right from Bitcoin's code-base, making them relatively worthless to use for any sort of real life trading(Just use Bitcoin instead), or are obvious scams. With that in mind, I choose the most likely candidate, Monero. From what I can see it would fit rather snugly within such a dividend payout system, it's ring signatures provide the absolute best anonymity available and both transparency(Though that is optional), so it won't get on any governments "blacklist" anytime soon. The blockchain is obscured, and payments are untraceable and unlinkable, and it's relatively high marketcap and liquidity make it prime to use without fear of too large volatility.
The rest of the market would be normal, stylish interface, simple and easy to use when singing up, the basics. So in a sense, the dividend system would be like owning a corperation, where in order for the market to function properly and for everyone to be satisfied, you'd need all 3 types of users benefiting(admin, vendors, and buyers).
And just like that you go from personal use buyer to full fledged participant in a criminal enterprise.