<story><title>A decentralized anonymous marketplace</title><url>https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2014-March/013304.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>runeks</author><text>As far as I can see, the essential problem with decentralized anonymous marketplaces is that reviews need to cost money. Plain and simple. Good reviews have great value, so they need to have a non-zero price. A vendor&amp;#x27;s review history is the indicator by which you assess whether a vendor is trustworthy or not, and a vendor should have to pay to achieve a trustworthy reputation - if good reviews are free, and you can make money from good reviews, they would have little value.&lt;p&gt;This is the reason spam emails are so frequent: you can make money from something that costs very little. If reviews were near-free, good reviews would be as plentiful as spam emails.&lt;p&gt;Free reviews means vendors can make sock-puppet accounts, fake a transaction, and leave a five-star review to themselves. With Silk Road, they take &lt;i&gt;x&lt;/i&gt;% of the value of each transaction (or if not, that&amp;#x27;s at least how it should be), so if a vendor seeks to inflate their review score, they will pay a price for it.&lt;p&gt;In fact, a good overall review score for a vendor - as far as I can tell - is the sum of all the review &amp;quot;values&amp;quot; (1 to five stars) multiplied by the value of the transaction in question. So a vendor with 10 five-star reviews on 10 orders of a value of 1 BTC each, would have the same score as a vendor with a single five-star review on a single transaction with a value of 10 BTC. Both these vendors would have paid the same amount of money to get this, equal, review score.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve thought a bit about this, and I don&amp;#x27;t see how this can be solved in a decentralized market, with no middleman to tax transactions, and make sure that vendors can&amp;#x27;t get free reviews.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ap22213</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t help me to know that an anonymous person had tipped an anonymous vendor.  That doesn&amp;#x27;t add much value.&lt;p&gt;However, it would be sufficient if I could somehow determine that someone that I knew had tipped the vendor.&lt;p&gt;Of course, I don&amp;#x27;t want my friends to see that I had tipped someone, or all of those of whom I have tipped.  I just want it to be possible that they can see my tip, within an aggregate poll, only if and when dealing with that vendor.</text></comment>
<story><title>A decentralized anonymous marketplace</title><url>https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2014-March/013304.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>runeks</author><text>As far as I can see, the essential problem with decentralized anonymous marketplaces is that reviews need to cost money. Plain and simple. Good reviews have great value, so they need to have a non-zero price. A vendor&amp;#x27;s review history is the indicator by which you assess whether a vendor is trustworthy or not, and a vendor should have to pay to achieve a trustworthy reputation - if good reviews are free, and you can make money from good reviews, they would have little value.&lt;p&gt;This is the reason spam emails are so frequent: you can make money from something that costs very little. If reviews were near-free, good reviews would be as plentiful as spam emails.&lt;p&gt;Free reviews means vendors can make sock-puppet accounts, fake a transaction, and leave a five-star review to themselves. With Silk Road, they take &lt;i&gt;x&lt;/i&gt;% of the value of each transaction (or if not, that&amp;#x27;s at least how it should be), so if a vendor seeks to inflate their review score, they will pay a price for it.&lt;p&gt;In fact, a good overall review score for a vendor - as far as I can tell - is the sum of all the review &amp;quot;values&amp;quot; (1 to five stars) multiplied by the value of the transaction in question. So a vendor with 10 five-star reviews on 10 orders of a value of 1 BTC each, would have the same score as a vendor with a single five-star review on a single transaction with a value of 10 BTC. Both these vendors would have paid the same amount of money to get this, equal, review score.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve thought a bit about this, and I don&amp;#x27;t see how this can be solved in a decentralized market, with no middleman to tax transactions, and make sure that vendors can&amp;#x27;t get free reviews.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hendzen</author><text>You can use proof-of-sacrifice to give reviews a cost. Look up OP_RETURN in relation to bitcoin.</text></comment>