To show how potentially creepy this is, I googled your users. I was able to find the user's linkedin and twitter in the 1st page of the search results.
Anyways, good luck. I love the idea, and your design is fantastic. Best of luck going forward.
It would be an overwhelmingly bad idea to start letting sellers hide behind usernames if those sellers are responsible for accepting money and shipping products. (This would be somewhat solved by Tinytrunk handling payments, but that goes against one of his stated goals of not charging processing fees.)
Edit: I actually didn't know, so I looked it up. Turns out that eBay does not handle payments. Though I suppose they're relying on the reputation system.
So it's not an overwhelmingly bad idea to allow sellers to hide behind usernames when they're handling payments and shipping as long as there is a good reputation system in place. Which makes sense since that's why you would want your name there anyway, to lend or gain reputation.
that's actually one of the reasons I don't use eBay to sell things, I have no reputation on eBay.
but selling to my locality, I'm happy to give away my identity in exchange for an instant boost of reputation / buyer peace-of-mind.
I fully understand the point that Fookyoung made. That he want to make sure real, accountable users are selling things on Tinytrunk.
Obviously, Fookyoung is trying to balance between preventing seller fraud and Tinytrunk's user experience. However, I think the balance is tipped towards preventing seller fraud at the expense of user experience.
However, there potentially harmful and/or unintended consequences that can result from publicly disclosing the user's full name on the internet, e.g. privacy related issues. For example, a malicious user can easily obtain sensitive and private information about a certain seller ala 4chan style either directly or indirectly. Also, we've seen how users reactive negatively to potential privacy issues nowadays [cite various user discontent towards facebook, google plus, and various social networks here].
Also, this is not a binary issue, e.g. either disclose the user's full-name or use nothing but pseudonyms. There are other alternatives and compromises, like the yelp method that I described above (which task rabbit also uses).
We can argue further on the issue of real names vs pseudonyms on preventing seller fraud. Like someone above me pointed out, ebay is a great example of a buying/selling market that thrived despite its users hiding behind pseudonyms. Etsy is also another example. Let's not forget various online forums that have thriving for-sale and for-trade sub-forums w/ its sellers and buyers using pseudonyms, e.g. AnandTech and Hard[OC].
I prefer when everyone knows who everyone else is, personally, but I understand that many people don't want to broadcast their personal information.
But yes, full disclosure might not be appropriate.