Tim May wrote:
There really is no long-term need for an Ebay to be a "market maker." The future will bring more options for online auctions, for new pricing mechanisms.
(Personally, I can see systems like Mojo recasting themselves as alternatives to Ebay. I don't know if Jim and his friends are thinking along these lines, though.)
I have been giving a lot of thought to auction protocols that would work using signed encrypted packets distributed by a Gnutella-style peer-to-peer network. Tim is absolutely right -- the world needs an online marketplace that does not have a central administrative or corporate point of attack -- or rather, the world is getting one whether it needs it or not. So far, all of the ideas I have come up would require a relatively stable system for recording reputation capital and associating it with nyms. I haven't figured out a protocol for doing THAT without it becoming a point of attack for the decentralized market system. It would help a lot if someone figured out a way to set up an Ebay style feedback system for nyms that received significant usage from many different groups of traders of a type not readily susceptible of being demonized. Then a decentralized auction system could outsource that function without the function becoming a vulnerable attack point. -- Daniel