Hi fellas, this is my first ever post on the lemmy :)
After browsing the communities I stumbled across “A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world” aka c/privacy. So I decided that something that I recently wrote could not be more relevant to c/privacy.
My fellow privacy aware individuals I would like to bring to your attention the existance of a DLT-based open source decentralized marketplace with a mission to facilitate free and private trade of goods and services.
It is called the Particl Marketplace and it’s ground breaking V3.0 is set to be released after 3 years of hard development work.
I hope my own description below of the marketplace and its technology will fuel your interest to read more about it. My even bigger hope is that some of you will decide to become first-hand beta testers as soon as the Particl Marketplace v3.0 hits the testnet (eta: a few weeks).
You can also use the exiting version (currently 2.3.5) of the Particl Marketplace to buy or sell products on the single public community market there (or just download it and play with it).
The marketplace:
The upcoming V3.0 of the marketplace will be the first version aimed at a wider public. It will allow anyone to create easily a decentralized personal storefront or a community market or simply buy/sell goods on the already existing markets. The user-created markets/storefronts on the marketplace can be public if the access key is publicly announced on the Particl network or absolutely invisible to anyone that doesn’t know the access key (held by the creator). This is an intentional privacy feature and simply put without going into many technical details, if you dont have the market access key (essentially a decryption key) there is absolutely no way to see/detect that some market exists.
The Particl Marketplace is designed to be private by default with no middlemen/intermediaries whatsoever. The trades are protected by two-way automated escrow via smart-contracts that de-incentivize and penalize dishonest behavior on both sides. In particular, the buy-flow forces the buyer to deposit 1x item value + payment and seller 1x item value (+ sends item) into a common smart contract. If the buyer receives the product/service and its all good, then he unlocks the escrow so both can get their 1x item value deposits back and seller receive his payment.
The marketplace takes no sales commissions from the storefronts/markets and charges only a tiny listing fee (<0.01$) to prevent listing spamming. All the marketplace generated fees go to the staking nodes that provide the hardware infrastructure for the p2p network to operate. The staking nodes can be public or you can run them as Tor hidden services.
The technology:
The Open Marketplace is crypto-agnostic and currently supports payments in BTC, PART, ZCoin (DAI, NIX are next in the pipeline and many more to come). It uses as a settlement layer its native blockchain, which is an up-to-date Bitcoin codebase with added privacy features like CT, RingCT (up to 32 mixins), Stealth addresses, etc. These privacy features are used in combination to keep the financial data like escrows, transactions, etc private and most importantly un-linkable to the actual market buys/sells.
For the user or markets related data exchange like posted listings, buy/sell flows, encrypted user communication, built-in cryptocurrency exchange, etc, the Particl Marktplace uses a custom DSN, currently its a Bitmessage variant called SMSG, which allows metadata stripped encrypted data exchange.
Last but not least the Particl Marketplace client has a built-in option for using Tor network via proxy.
The important people:
The cypherpunks behind Particl’s Open Marketplace have been OGs freedom advocates and passionate pioneers in the privacy DLT field. For example, they were the first ever to implement features like RingCT, Bulletproofs, PoS, cold staking, etc on a Bitcoin codebase. Their privacy features implementations have been audited successfully by several respectable academics and security R&D providers, like QuarksLab.
The team has been so far focused on building without any marketing and thus have remained intentionally in the shadows but the latter is planned to change with the v3.0 release. One of the steps towards that will be the initiation of several long-planned awareness campaigns, like Vendor On-boarding and Outreach Program, the Particl Academy, an easy to understand and learn about the project portal, and many more.
Me:
I am a passionate freedom and privacy advocate that discovered the project 1.5 year ago and since then has become a member of their small but like-minded community (mbacoinin@element/discord).
My personal belief is that they are releasing to the world is a game-changing/breaking product. At the minimum, due to the open source nature of the project, this is a proof of concept that is bound to shift the global eCommerce paradigm into DeCommerce.
How does search work? This was the major pain point for openbazzar. The search was centralized.
In a nutshell: The market listings (and everything else that doesn’t need to be immutable) are propagated as meta-data stripped encrypted messages (no source no destination) via the SMSG network. If you client knows the market access key (essentially a decryption key) then it can decrypt those messages. As an end user that means that you will be able to “access the market” and see the listing posted there. So for all the markets that you have access to, your client has locally stored the products information. And to answer your question any product search is just a search in your local database.
As I said in my post, it impossible to know if a market exist if you dont have the access key. The content of the metadata stripped encrypted messages could be anything (chat, buy/sell flow, bot commands, etc…). So no global market search will ever be possible, only in those that you have access too.