Hi Folk,
what about a marketplace category for SNO to buy / sell hardware for this project?
Some SNO’s are upgrading and sell some stuff or looking for some good deals for used hardware which is Storj approved and works fine.
Maybe we could sort the market by country / state to save shipping costs?
Let me know what you think 
Thats a cool idea @solu!
As the community manager, I guess I immaediately think of what could o rihgt and what could go wrong.
Pro: would be a great way to find good deals, would save shipping costs, general coolness.
Con: what if a buyer is dissatisfied? what is a seller doesnt ship something and keeps the money?
I worry about that because it would be a problem that I cant fix.
I know that I have seen other communities where the rule is “buyer beware”. So if there are problems with a purchase the members must resolve the issue privately. Im not sure that method would be successful here though. Is there a way that you can think of that would allow this to happen without too many problems?
Would love to hear any suggestions from other people – I recognize that I dont have all the answers myself : maybe theres an easy way to do it that Im not thinking of
I think its a cool idea expect all the issues of privacy, And getting scammed… If there was a way to securely buy items this would be fine with protection. I used to be apart of a pretty cool site where you could actually buy items with crypto securely as well. I found the website here https://bitify.com/
good point @deathlessdd I guess if theres any assortment of people to have ideas on privacy and safety, this is the right group 
Indeed i understand your concern as a community manager for sure!
The market should work like a place where SNO could offer their hardware for free.
If they decide to offer something they agree with the privacy terms that such a
offering brings with it.
Same with potential customers / buyers if the decide to buy something.
Wasn’t Paypal a secure solution for the payment process?
For privacy maybe a packing station is acceptable, so all what it’s needed is
a packing station number and a email address.
the problem with online trade is that there is a need for a middle man of sorts that essentially stores and verifies the goods, so that others can pay for it and know what they are buying and that it will be delivered, to a certain degree of certainty and to avoid scams, frauds and what not…
i really like the idea tho…
not sure if there is a better way, but having a middle man is a sure fire solution… else we would have to do either some kind of verification or trust levels… so that we can build up a sense of if people can be trusted and ofc that will always go wrong at some points…
ofc the middle man is an expensive and labor intensive part… i’m sure somebody has better knowledge on how they solve those kinds of online trade issues today… it’s just the base concept i’m familiar which solves the online trade problem.
in your opinion, would a smart contract make sense in this kind of use case @sgc?
the problem as i see it, boils down to… that the trade needs to be verified by a 3rd party…
somebody to hold the bag of gold and verify the item being traded is what is claimed.
without some physical institution, person or device in the middle either party can easily trick the other because of the distance and delay in the trade.
if someone sends money, then the seller might not send the item…
if the buyer won’t pay until the item is received then the buyer might not pay.
if either party or a 3rd party has a trigger or lock that releases the money to the seller after the buyer has gotten his item, then the buyer can claim the item was broken, or the seller could have sold a broken item without anyone knowing it…
so one ends up with one solution that removes most of these issues… tho no solution is perfect.
a 3rd trusted party needs to hold the money and verify the item and then do the trade, i’m sure smart contracts could be involved with that…
it all boils down to trust… from an objective observers point of view, neither the seller nor the buyer can be trusted, because one cannot get enough information to determine if anything they say is true.
if the buyer’s payment and the seller’s item is true… thus the deal can be verified and commence.
ofc that system also have some drawbacks… mainly the 3rd trusted party needs to be able to verify the item is what it’s suppose to be and know that it is functional, but sure is a lot more difficult to cheat in such a setup…
alternatively one might make some sort of deposit, crypto locked trust value using some sort of MAD contract like solution… Mutual Assured Destruction…
if the trust is broken and somebody pushes the big red button everybody involved losses…
much less labor intensive, not sure well that would work either… people tend to push red buttons lol
i suppose one might do something kind a public key scheme…
both pay a deposit based on some value of the trade into a MAD smart contract of which either party if dissatisfied could destroy.
and then after a certain time lock it will be released again if nobody was MAD enough to push the button.
really the only thing one is doing is trying to mitigate scams, somebody will eventually find a loop hole…
here we have a commonly used system with verified identity… that way you can know who you are dealing with at the very least… keeps people from making thousands of accounts and scamming people, seems to work quite well…
ofc small country so i suppose it’s much more likely that if you scam people they will show up on your door step… 
sorry that i don’t have an easy answer for you…
i’m sure smart contracts can be used in many solutions in regard to something like a 3rd party trade…
i will say tho i don’t think the 3rd party trust deal thing will be efficient enough for what we need to do here… so we will need a similar safe guard, that doesn’t involve sending items around to multiple places.
it’s just not easy to do “securely” without something like that…
yeah I agree with your points. I guess with any time stuff is being sold on the internet, there will be people looking to make mischief.
Maybe someone will build this as a business and store their ecommerce data on tardigrade someday 
There are already several such decentralized marketplaces that do not require a third party to control and secure the deal, such as https://openbazaar.org/
well that bazar thing looks like shops… most SNO’s is unlikely to be trading hardware all the time…
so i would assume there will be a ton of first user deals… buying art from an artist where you know they sold like 100 pictures already comes with a certain pedigree… but ofc it’s all down to trust
i just prefer reliable methods, sure if some sno’s sell lots of stuff they won’t have a problem… but how else would you avoid scams in one time deals between strangers.
If you have read enough it’s doing as usual - you pay via escrow and payment can be received only if both are agree (hint - “Secure Escrow and Dispute Resolution”), also you can use a third party as an arbitrage (for dispute resolution). I think such platforms are the future of p2p trading.
i don’t disagree that it’s the future of p2p trading, but i don’t see how a 3rd party can resolve an already performed scam done by a stranger, nor how that both parties having to agree will resolve a mean spirited person from stalling the process.
but maybe the are more safe guards that those…
lol now i’m getting ideas… it’s dangerous to inspire me… atleast for me
Easy. You select a moderator (they have a good article how to choose a good moderator) and select them as an arbiter. Then pay via moderated payment. If all going well - both parties buyer and seller will click on release payment and buyer have a good and seller have money.
If one of them is a scammer - the other party can click on the “dispute” and then the moderator is to come to resolve a dispute. The moderator can release money either to the buyer or to the seller and will receive some fee for their work as a moderator. Technically it’s performed via the multisig wallet - any two is enough to release money.
The moderator can chat with both parties to get more information or proofs and so on.
Have you buy something on Amazon or AliExpress? It’s the same, but with cryptocurrency, and you choose the moderator, not the owner of the platform.
I believe there should be something similar for the ETH ecosystem.
i generally just use ebay, their search is better and most often their prices are much better.
but yeah i usually have a steady stream of packages from all over the world that i’m waiting for…
tho i just look at the ebay ratings of the sellers and go with those that seem reasonable, rarely had any big problems with that…
a year or so ago i did buy a couple of sas hdd’s where one was broken… did take me months to figure that out tho… so i would consider that i got scammed on that deal… but i got two for the price of 1… so kinda figured something was up… but was a great offer so i figured what the hell…
think i paid 60-90$
moving the money isn’t what i see as the problem… it’s the verifying that the item is legit, which seem trivial but really can be quite difficult when it really boils down to it…
haven’t seen that arbiter system used before… but it’s essentially want i’m talking about… just that the arbiter comes if it goes bad… which does solve some of the issues i’m sure…
but sure doesn’t seem like a perfect system… but i don’t suppose anything really is…
i like having good odd’s
i really don’t understand why amazon is so popular either… i’ve been trying to use them many times… i don’t think i’ve succeeded once to find the best offer there… ofc maybe it’s because shipping in stuff here from america costs the better part of a plane ticket to the states.
and shipping is basically free from the rest of europa and even china, even tho china is so slow now after trump started the trade war… before that i could get my stuff in like a week… but i guess after all the tariffs, it now goes on ships rather than airmail
Just keep it simple.
List it on ebay (or some other trusted platform) and have a forum thread space here for people to say “hey, I listed X for sale, here is a link to it.”
Win/Win. Community space to share, don’t deal with the transaction hassle.
Don’t turn this into something more complicated than it needs to be.