this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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TL;DR - I have an idea for a P2P decentralized marketplace using Monero and Nostr, but I'm looking for feedback and help.

So I'm a web developer that works mainly in Python (Flask), and I believe in Monero. I recently had an idea to make an open source P2P marketplace. Basically, this would work like Nostr (or on the Nostr protocol) where everything is decentralized, allowing each individual merchant to be responsible for their own legality. Payments wouldn't be handled by the marketplace. All that it would do is display the seller's receive address or qr code, and then check if the payment came through in full. So the seller would need to provide their receive address and view key which would be stored locally on the seller's computer. Once the payment is received, the marketplace would mark the order as confirmed and the seller would be responsible for fulfilling the order. I could even automate the release of digital goods on confirmation.

Since there is no way to really enforce that sellers are legitimate with this idea, there would need to be some kind of review system, like what LocalMonero.co has. Basically you can rate a merchant if you have bought from them before. People who cheat the system would drop in rankings and be avoided, while good sellers would move up in discoverability. And all merchants would be discoverable in the home screen via search or browsing. You could also subscribe to favorite merchants.

In my mind, this marketplace would solve a lot of problems at once. First off, it would make a decentralized place to buy and sell goods in private. This adds liquidity to Monero and gives us all a way to use our Monero for goods that we actually want to receive. Making the on boarding to this app super simple would allow it to basically function like a P2P amazon or ebay. The more people that sign up, the more things we have available. Merchants can be businesses or individuals.

Another thing it solves is onboarding to Monero in general. Instead of having people buy their Monero, they can get a wallet app on their phone, make a merchant account as quickly as you can sign up for a Nostr account, and sell something for Monero. No CEXs, just exchanging goods for digital cash. Want more Monero? Sell some more stuff? If it gained enough traction, it could easily attract more people to Monero as well.

This has even been done before, but it is on the Lightning Network and requires you to set up a lightning node, from what I can tell. It's not as easy as scanning a qr code to send money to someone for a good. Still, it's worth checking out. Here's the code: https://github.com/lnbits/nostrmarket, and here's a demonstration of it: https://www.youtube.com/live/2NueacYJovA?feature=share&t=6846

I'm posting this all here for two reasons. First, I wanted to know if this makes sense to anyone else. Does this sound like as good of an idea to others as it does to me? Is there anything I am missing? Has this been done before with Monero or is it being worked on by anyone else? I know of MoneroTalk's XMRBazaar, which was part of the inspiration for this, but from what I remember, that was going to use mediators to facilitate transactions, which is more overhead than I am thinking is necessary.

The other reason I bring it up is to see if others are interested in helping (or taking the idea and building it themselves before I can). I am inexperienced in coding around Monero as well as Nostr. I'm not afraid of the Monero part. That sounds pretty straightforward, especially with the python-monero package. The Nostr stuff might take me a while to figure out though. And since this seems like such a good idea to me, I'd rather tell others about it and maybe get a workable version sooner than keep it to myself. So if you'd like to help or run with this idea, go for it.

Thanks in advance.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I thought several years ago that OpenBazaar had a good idea but never ended up finishing it. Something like that might be adaptable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

@shortwavesurfer @treetrnk open bazaar failed to embrace Monero. It died.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I didn't think it was ever finished, but it might be possible to take it and make it use Monero.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

@shortwavesurfer BTC multisig escrow was assumed deep in the guts of OB. A few Monero folks were looking into the work required to replace it, but OB flat out refused to commit *any* resources to it. The founder literally told me his investors would leave. Well guess what they did anyway.

I would love to see a fully decentralized, Tor-and-XMR-native marketplace. It blows my mind that we still don't have one. I would love to contribute to such an effort, if a credible one is on offer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Well, OB could be forked. Maybe even ActivityPub over tor/i2p. Then you sub to a market with your mastodon or whatever and you get a post if things are added to the market and a link to that item.