Decentralized Blockchain-Based Electronic Marketplaces
cacm.acm.org
cacm.acm.org
1) Throughout history middlemen have suffered a common fate. They get squeezed out at every opportunity. We have a chance to cut out the rent-seeking middlemen, with revolutionary new business models that allow fees to go to ~zero.
2) Blockchain technology gives us a censorship resistance. Not only from governments that like to ban certain types of marketplaces, but also from centralized marketplaces which like to pick and choose who is welcome on their platforms. Just look at Uber and Airbnb as examples. They have been banned in cities all around the world & have likewise banned certain individuals for life from ever using their marketplaces.
3) We can redistribute value to the people who actually contribute the most value in the network. Uber and Airbnb wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the first 100 drivers/hosts, but what did those drivers/hosts get in exchange? Meanwhile, the early employees, investors and founders get filthy rich. New token economics give us a "better than free" business model that incentivizes people to use a platform that rewards early participants in the network.
4) Blockchain powered marketplaces are instantly global. This is a non-trivial advantage over anyone who attempts to create a centralized marketplace and has to wade through the local laws and banking regulations for each and every jurisdiction in the world where they wish to operate.
On the other hand, for matching, you get the greatest selection if there is ONE marketplace.
Capitalism takes care of this. Through a competitive marketplace of marketplaces, marketplaces are forced to reduce middlemen fees to the lowest necessary. Even a block-chain middlemen-less implementation will have costs associated with decentralization (see PayPal vs Bitcoin transaction fees). Fees will never achieve zero because fees cover things like fraud, service, etc, that even decentralization can't remove.
> 2) Blockchain technology gives us a censorship resistance. Not only from governments that like to ban certain types of marketplaces, but also from centralized marketplaces which like to pick and choose who is welcome on their platforms. Just look at Uber and Airbnb as examples. They have been banned in cities all around the world & have likewise banned certain individuals for life from ever using their marketplaces.
This is false. Unless your blockchain distributed app purely runs on the blockchain (has no oracles in the case of Ethereum, has no real world data dependency, has no point where it converts or interacts with the real world such as enforcing an exchange of goods) then the real world can enact regulations on it and shut it down. Silk road was hidden using Tor, but not something a distributed app can necessarily be better at. The one advantage of crypto coins is it allows internet transactions that share some properties of cash like non-reversability. Try to run a non-sanctioned cryptocoin in China to resist censorship. You will not be able to do it.
> 3) We can redistribute value to the people who actually contribute the most value in the network. Uber and Airbnb wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the first 100 drivers/hosts, but what did those drivers/hosts get in exchange? Meanwhile, the early employees, investors and founders get filthy rich. New token economics give us a "better than free" business model that incentivizes people to use a platform that rewards early participants in the network.
The first few drivers were commodities. You measure their reward based on the risk they put in and frankly those early drivers may have been early, but certainly did not put in the risk. If anything, uber/lyft/airbnb probably served them well by giving them employment that they otherwise would not have had. So the capitalist system is already working for the most part and a crypto-anarchist system is not necessary to make this point any fairer.
> 4) Blockchain powered marketplaces are instantly global. This is a non-trivial advantage over anyone who attempts to create a centralized marketplace and has to wade through the local laws and banking regulations for each and every jurisdiction in the world where they wish to operate.
For trading in information yes since cross-border information flow is mostly unregulated (except for China). But for anything that requires shipping, until you can ship it through a fiber cable then no. Local laws and banking regulations have a purpose, and simply having a distributed app does not make it easier to circumvent laws.
1) "We have a chance to cut out the rent-seeking middlemen"
In the case of Amazon, is there really rent seeking? They provide lots of benefits as the middleman - trust, support, consistency (YMMV).
2) "...centralized marketplaces which like to pick and choose who is welcome on their platforms."
Again, for me this is a feature, not a bug.
3) "...but what did those drivers/hosts get in exchange?"
Money.
"New token economics"
What are new token economics? And why are they any better than what preceded them?
The token sale doesn't reward participation, it rewards speculation
And for some people, it isn't. The point of decentralisation is that you can opt-in to centralized systems if you want to. The converse is not true.
Development is not free. Users generally want new features over time. A distributed 2000-era netflix service where people mail each other dvds wouldn't survive in 2018. Who does development without a middleman? Part of the reason why something like uber works is because drivers do not have the technical capacity to build their own system.
The idea that cryptoassets and associated systems is going to bring about a revolution that frees people from capitalism is insane to me. Wealth is amazingly concentrated among early adopters and difficulty curves are generally weighted hard towards benefiting a few early people. Why would a distributed marketplace suddenly bring the power to the people? You still need the capital to buy a car to be a distributed-uber driver after all.
No one’s going to stop you from using an unfree, censorious system if you want to. However, we’re going to object vociferously if you try to force it on everyone else.
> I want my uber driver to have insurance and a quick background check.
The advantage of censorship-resistant markets is that added features are opt-in. I don’t really care if my uber driver is regulated according to taxi union rules, so I’d rather not pay the associated costs.
You didn't really answer the bits where he was more or less discussing government regulations. Your answer doens't relate to what he stated.
Actually, looking back, which bits are you even talking about?
As for who is going to pay for this, the users can still pay money for the individual apps (perhaps they would get a commission from each ride they enable, unless a Free Software alternative emerged), and the app makers could pay a licensing fee to the third party that provides the insurance check or other reputation metric.
The real unsolved problem is how to decentralise a reputation system without it being subject to Sybil attacks or breaching people's privacy.
Which is to say, the question "Can a blockchain be used to solve [X]?" is answered "No" for almost every question.
Note: I am not trying to contradict you here, just looking to understand this whole thing from a different angle.
And when the rep gets bad enough, no worries if it's a censorship/ban free platform. Just start over.
So there are some moral hazards. (Not that they can't be overcome.)
Not that I think that this is a bad thing. As a consumer I want somebody else to take care that the things that I can buy don't kill me and I wouldn't trust some random commenters on the Internet for that kind of information.
I think we are in the process of transferring from institutional authority to algorithmic authority.
This statement is meaningless. What are the contents of this alleged social contract you're referring to? I bet your answer is going to differ from mine, or from the next person's.
Do you derive emotional satisfaction from putting words into other people's mouths?
> I mean, you haven't asked _me_ anything, you asked some other user.
Then what was the point of your reply?
> Throughout history middlemen have suffered a common fate. They get squeezed out at every opportunity.
Be sure to let Priceline.com know how that theory actually works in practice, versus an 85 year old industry that should have squeezed out all middlemen by now.
Google search, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Tumblr, Reddit, Snapchat, Spotify, Netflix, these are all middlemen products/companies.
eBay, Craigslist, Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Poshmark, Overstock, Alibaba, Target, Aldi, Ikea, CVS, Walgreens, the app stores, and on it goes. All middlemen stores/platforms.
Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, PayPal, Square, Stripe, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Ant and so on. All middlemen financial products and companies.
Your premise is exactly wrong. History says, over and over again for hundreds of years now, that middlemen thrive in every industry perpetually. What changes are the details of which ones thrive or fail at a given time.
There are zero examples of decentralized anything of scale similar to any of the giant platforms and it's not because we can't build them, people have tried over and over again to get users to use them. There's a reason for that persistent failure.
Assuming fees are derived from the mining ability of the network, as more activity brings value to the network the mining fee should literally approach 0 cost.
This is just... Absolute nonsense. Just factually incorrect. Middlemen, example Amazon, have never been stronger. People complain about it on HN all the time.
Anyways, people use middlemen and are happy to pay the cost because they provide a useful service. They aren't just arbitrarily injecting themselves into transactions.
The strength of a middleman can be directly measured by how much they mark up prices. Does amazon really mark up prices more than the brick and mortar retailers it replaced?
Anyway, I don't think "markup" is very much related to how strong they are. I define "strong" as "how critical for business that service is."
I'm just using Amazon as an example, one that everyone can understand has a massive amount of power.
I think of distributors, not retail stores, to be pretty much the strongest middlemen there is. If you're making a widget are you going to hire someone full time to market your product to individual stores and then hire and maintain a fleet to deliver them? Fuck no you aren't, you're going to call a distributor.
Actually that is how I envision people becoming self-reliant in a post-job society. Being jobless and with little money means you got: 1. free time, and 2. needs to fulfil. But jobless people are not without skills - we don't suddenly forget everything we learned when we lose our jobs. There's plenty of skilled people with time and a motive to work.
So why not get services in exchange for services, from jobless person to jobless person? In order to do that we'd need a "human coin". Humans can make a lot of what they need directly - grow food, build houses, repair cars, supervise and educate kids, make clothes. These services should be obtained in the service-for-service system, without money. It leads to a more self-reliant society that doesn't depend on state money, or worse, on transferring money from corporations to people - we all know it's going to be hard to part corporations from their money in the name of social good.
UBI is demeaning and robs people of agency, self-reliance is the exact opposite. Using a "human coin" we could create a marketplace of skills and services without corporate money. Self-reliance should exist at all levels - personal, family, social group, city and country. Each level should be as self-reliant as possible, reducing the need for international commerce and dependence on external factors. When self reliance reaches 100% there would be almost no need to use money, perhaps just for raw materials, so we should be researching new materials that are plentiful and can be produced locally.
That system has existed since civilization began - it's called bartering.
In one corner of the web, I hear people being mad when Twitter doesn't ban the POTUS. And on the opposite side I hear you complaining about centralization. I can't somehow get around both of these angry voices operating at the same time (even maybe by the same people). Do we want a centralized system at the end, or a decentralized permisionless system with all the nasty things it entails? For me, I don't know. I lean toward preferring centralized systems. I rather embrace the devil I know.
Not sure, why you are so in love with decentralization. Are you sure we really want it? It's not all roses and flowers with decentralized systems.
Umm... yes it does. That's precisely the role of a whitelist.
Do you have a fix to that?
(But actually content-based filtering may not be too impossible now that I think..)
The same for open currencies. The promise of open currencies with decentralized exchanges is I can now hold my value in a currency I trust a long a there is a path of exchange between my value and the value of the party I'm paying for or recieving from. And now its my decision which currency I hold and I'm free to change.
(And what about revenge porn, child pornography, etc.? Merely you not seeing it through your filters, it doesn't mean the world won't. It's equivalent of the guy closing his eyes to make sure all outside threats disappear.)
Furthermore, without an escrow feature, buyers will tend to stick to highly reputable sellers, creating a barrier for new competition and enabling price and power consolidation.
How might this be solved in a decentralized marketplace?
Blockchains are spectacularly inefficient. Fees aren’t going to go to zero on any blockchain that deals with any significant amount of traffic.
I'm mind blown by the fact that none of these new-cryptocoins are getting hacked - there's an enormous bounty out there for who's able to figure out how to double-spend these things! How's it possible that they all work well, but are based on different principles? My conclusion is that there are hackers that are currently double-spending to their advantage: without telling anybody and without making it clear that it's happening.
Also, the whole idea of "scarcity" (which was my main attraction to this field) doesn't exist anymore because of forks: if a group of people decides to fork the software, your coins are duplicated and aren't scarce anymore, so it's not even like gold anymore.
Sometimes I wonder if we'd be better off without a blockchain, and instead with a system where we trust lots of big entities to record the ledger in a way that still allows us to get some level of freedom-of-use, anonymity, censorship-resistance and anybody-can-enter kind of system.
All you need is to know which coin/token you are on and you know whether you have the original or not.
You can build as many cryptocurrencies as you want to. They aren't bitcoin as they don't have the history of bitcoin which means that they aren't the same.
Only bitcoin is bitcoin, because only bitcoins has the history they have.
Each coin has a unique history. You can create as many forks of bitcoin as you want it doesn't change the fact that there is only one bitcoin.
Does that mean that paper money isn't scarce?
Dollar bills, of course, are protected from counterfeiting, in the same way that bitcoins are.
So no... not the same.
First of all, I COULD sell my stale2002 dollars for real dollars, at market price, as long as I am not lying about what I am selling.
The price of my sale2002 dollars would probably be ~0, but I am still not breaking the law.
If you fork Bitcoin, you can't redeemed your forked coins for real Bitcoin, either.
It would be a completely new and different currency.
The same exact thing is the case with my new paper bills.
Dismissing it because it is still struggling with the same issues seems premature.
It's a very very small amount of people involved in Crypto globally - certainly not big enough to collapse any economy anywhere. The whole space is still in the process of being erected, the foundation is being built as we speak which is why money is going in rapidly and valuations are growing rapidly. The amount of noise Crypto makes in the media is disproportional to the amount of people actually involved and invested in the space. It won't be like this forever and there will be corrections, but for this small window of opportunity where everything seems crazy - it won't seem so crazy when you zoom out a year or two from now.
As a result of that, there will be scams and people trying to get in on the unregulated gold-rush but at the same time there are still legitimate projects being started right now that could become very valuable in the next couple of years.
Care to name a few?
Not only are they lacking exposure but it's a complicated, risky, error-prone process to actually buy in to these projects/tokens even for those who are technically apt. That's how early these projects are. Plus you'd need to register for an account on an exchange that actually carries these tokens and many are not accepting new users because they can't handle the load. It's a giant pain in the ass but there is a lot of money to be made (I'm up 3-5x already on much of my initial investments).
There is an artificial lack of access built into the market because of what I described above. Institutional capital and dumb money is still only really tuned into BTC/ETH.
2)The whole market is up 5x in December 2017 alone, so I wouldn't say 5x return makes you a genius - it's like saying you are performing at that asset class's benchmark. Note, this is also just one sample.
3)If we unpack your reasoning closely, you seem to assume that further upside is inevitable if altcoins get easier to buy. I guess it's unthinkable that these coins accrue through revenue, right?
I think that's the reason why so many people have trouble understanding the space. Fundamentally networks are what make humans so powerful. The USA is nothing more than a network of people that agree on a set of shared principles. The growth of a network's value isn't linear. A network that goes from 1 person to 2 people isn't twice as valuable, it's exponentially valuable and we're still in the really early stages of figuring out how to value these new, global networks that are forming rapidly.
So the real answer is that we just don't know, but it seems clear that the old world rules don't quite apply.
I never claimed I was a genius for generating 5x. I think you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not a genius. I just see an opportunity that I think a lot of people are missing. I think it's still very early in the space, and I'm making moves to take advantage of it. I'm willing to be wrong and lose 100% of my investment. I'm diversified into my holdings, I follow the projects and teams closely and in case of regulatory risk I have an exit strategy.
I do think further upside is inevitable just based on the sheer demand hammering the exchanges which carry these altcoins. If anything, the influx of capital waiting to flow in will stabilize the prices further even though it may not strictly generate more upside. It'll at the very least set some more solid floors in place for existing asset prices.
I can see BTC and ETH having long term value but I'm not so sure about LTC.
LTC'S main claim to fame seems to be that Charlie (it's creator) was working at Coinbase and managed to get it listed there.
Apart from that it appears to be a bunch of copy pasta code from other projects.
If you want to see a perfect example of this, check out this post on why LTC is "faster" than BTC:
https://twitter.com/r_Buttcoin/status/951585800147390464
The main thing I use LTC for right now is buying ALT's from other exchanges because its network fees are cheaper than ETH/BTC/BCH. I don't see this situation lasting forever especially considering Charlie (LTC'S creator) recently unloaded all of his LTC.
If it takes the best of all blockhain projects, I'm all for that.
What the heck are you talking about!? Kodak, the former camera company, announced at CES they were going to be selling cloud miners and have their own cryptocoin. Juice companies are announcing blockchain projects. People you run into at grocery stores are randomly bringing up bitcoin...
This is as big as bitcoin gets. And when it pops, that's it for Bitcoin. You can't get bigger than a juice company announcing it will be doing "something with the blockchain". Once it's over, Bitcoin will have lost its original purpose (a currency) and people will leave because its current purpose ("store of value") will have proven worthless too.
The ones that took out $50k from their life savings will be fucked. The drug dealers, crypto-ransomware writers, and murder-for-hire people will have moved onto some other coin. The non-criminal market will write the whole cryptospace off as a scam and go back to using VISA and Mastercard to pay for their lattes.
This is it. This is peak bitcoin. It will never get this high again because the core of Bitcoin is fatally flawed for countless reasons that have been discussed since its creation 9 years ago.
I hear that a lot. Many tokens have a floor, which is the actual value of the tokenized assets. Filecoin's floor is the cost/demand for actual hard drive space. Tickets to artist concerts tokenized would have a floor. Our token (Intercoin.org) has a floor represented by actual economies of communities.
Bitcoin on the other hand, has no floor. Just like Myspace vs Facebook or AltaVista vs Google, people can switch easily.
And therefore it clearly follows that bitcoin is worth, what, $13,400 per BTC?
If the amount of crypto-coin is near limitless (hint: it is), why is any of it worth anything at all?
Which is yet another flaw in the original Bitcoin premise... that because Bitcoin is scarce, it is valuable. But guess what... bitcoin isn't scarce at all. It can, and has, and will continue to be forked. And yeah yeah yeah.... "network effects" and "first mover" and whatever. If, as you say, the switching costs are basically zero... why does any of it have any value at all?
I suppose that DentaCoin’s floor is the value of dentistry? What happens to its value if people decide they prefer ToothCoin? Or that dollars work for all of these things because fungability matters and you’ve got to pay taxes?
Imagining a significant portion of the economy using something like Monero is already a stretch, but there is no evidence that a separate currency for every product or service we want to interact with is a viable idea.
This may be the peak of Bitcoin (of which I have 0, by the way) or maybe not but it is by no means the peak of the cryptocurrency space collectively. Not even close.
As in, you can't get higher than 1,000 using blockchain technology? What about 50,000,000 using blockchain techhnology. The point of blockchain techhnology is that any company can create their own token and have a decentralized currency, independent of banks or country legislations.
So in that respect, blockchain technology is at 1/50,000th of what it's made for. Peak? No.
2. Thinks that maybe we should get rid of them, and replace them with one of those big companies that exposes hundreds of millions of user accounts every year
Do you really not see what you're arguing about here? These technologies use blockchain because of its security. All of those trillions and trillions of hashes ensure that it's not easy or cheap for anyone to hack the network.
Also the last part, how could you have anonymity and censorship with a big few entities? That's like the antithesis of anonymity and censorship-resistance. Haven't people here been arguing for years that having apps centralized in an app store like Apple's will lead to more censorship (and it has) vs installing any app you want from the "decentralized web"?
Apart from the fact that you can pay there with Bitcoin (which you can also do at other e-commerce stores), it seems similar to Shopify from a merchant's (or vendor in OB slang) perspective.
So I get that makes it simpler to use for products that are not simple to get otherwise (e.g. drugs), because of censorship and outdated governing (I know you can in theory buy and sell anything, but I just downloaded it and searched around and most products were either tests products, or drugs and sex-related), but I don't see what other benefits there are.
I mean most people who want to sell stuff over the internet struggle with the fact that nobody wants to actually buy their stuff - the fees or monthly costs don't seem to be the reason for the failure of these shops. Furthermore I would guess most people go to a central place like Amazon, because they have some kind of reputation (although expectations are getting lower) and their support ("where's my package") is quite OK (from a customer's perspective) - although the customers could go to small indie shops and buy stuff there.
Outside of products and services that are illegal to sell or buy because of jurisdictions (if these jurisdictions make sense is an orthogonal question I would say) what is the additional benefit for buyers and sellers?
I guess both customers and merchants want to buy or sell stuff and not read about things like the lightning network.