I wouldn’t be hosting or running a marketplace though. My plan is to write the code to make it possible for each individual seller to host/run their own shop that is accessible by anyone else running the same code. The code will be open source, so I’m not sure how I could be sued for any of that. My only involvement would be writing the code.

That also mitigates the problems with a centralized marketplace gaining a bad reputation. Some sellers will definitely cheat the system and those sellers will get a bad reputation, but that is true of anything on the internet. Any website can sell stuff and steal from you technically. Many don’t though because they don’t just want the money from your purchase, but also from all future sales.

Thanks, my thought was that it would require trust though. Just like ebay and Amazon receive payment before any products are sent.

I agree that it probably will be gamed and there will need to be some adjustments along the way, but I think there should be a way to do it that works. If the rating system doesn’t work, there could be curated lists of sellers that are trustworthy. Then you can subscribe to those sellers. And for smaller purchases or more unique goods from new sellers, the buyer would be taking a bit of a gamble just like they do on ebay, except without the support of ebay if there is a dispute. I know it has some problems, but I think it brings a lot of benefits that the trustless options don’t.

As far as I know, a trustless system can’t account for every problem either. If the buyer puts their money in escrow until they receive an item, then they could still say they never received the item, right? So that would give the seller no recourse other than leaving a bad review on the seller. (By the way, I could definitely be wrong here. Let me know if I am.) My thought was that we leave it up to the seller’s to fulfill their end of the deal with reputation and future sales as their incentive. There will be theft, especially at the beginning, but I think we can find ways to sort out the thieves from the honest sellers, and hopefully people would be smart enough not to test the market place with thousand dollar purchases.

I was actually looking to avoid escrow or any of the complicated parts of money handling. My plan was just to click buy, scan the qr code with your own wallet (separate from the marketplace), and then send the funds. The marketplace wouldn’t touch any crypto, and would only interact with it by checking if the funds came in on the seller’s client. That would make it super easy to onboard new sellers and buyers and keep legal stuff completely on the buyers and sellers.