Quote from: V4V on February 11, 2014, 07:54:23 PM

Glad to see that the asset exchange feature is coming along. I have a proposal for the asset exchange feature. It can truly make decentralized peer to peer transactions/exchanges legitimate. I have been developing this idea ever since the asset exchange feature was first mentioned in NXT. Here it is.

Obviously there are dangers inherent within p2p transactions. The main issue here is the lack of trust, and the trust that is lost by not utilizing a third party. When transactions are non reversible, especially with no intervening regulatory figure, the willingness to exchange goods, services, or currencies becomes an issue. My idea to bypass these issues involves an escrow service, a rating system (similar to those on Ebay and Amazon) and the aliasing feature.

Lets say..

"Joe" wants to exchange something of value with "Sue" but Joe and Sue don't know each other. How can Joe trust Sue in receiving the item in question after Joe pays Sue? Well of course, they can utilize a third party escrow service, which will insure Joe will receive the item in question by transferring money to the escrow service.

But,

you may be asking, doesn't the escrow service defeat the purpose of a true p2p exchange? Yes it does. But it doesn't have to be permanent. This is where NXT can implement a rating based system attached to accounts or the alias' of an account. Think of it as someones credit score attached to a social security number. But within the NXT ecosystem, the credit score is a star based rating, and the social security # is the users NXT account.

Now revisiting Joe and Sue's transaction, they "must" now rate each other based on how well they serviced each other after the transaction has taken place. When Joe and Sue continue to build their "trust" rating with everyday users of NXT, they have the choice of opting out of the escrow service and they can start trading and exchanging with other users that have trustworthy reputable ratings. After people have built trustworthy ratings within the NXT ecosystem, users will now have a much better understanding of whom they are doing business with, and will establish the most efficient p2p exchange mechanism which no other
crypto-currency utilizes.

I hope you developers see the potential of this system, especially in a p2p environment that exchanges things of value.

NXT: 5464489754473015994

This idea of third party security is a good, idea but why try to incorporate it in the network? it seems to me that it would make the usage of the feature overly complicated to implement and would work better as a private entity (i.e. a for hire security/escrow service) that could work for profit. I think that there is not an issue with financial services or products that are not decentralized. Decentralizing things like financial services and products actually would hurt the network as it would decrease incentive to participate. The Idea behind NXT from my perspective, is to provide a truly free market economy and a decentralized, common currency for that market economy. Decentralizing things like financial services and products takes away the opportunity for people to capitalize on providing these services. You should start your own NXT escrow business and charge people and make money. This is an issue that will define the network. The more things like this that you try to decentralize the more the network is actually going to be centralized. to me it is a waste of resources to try to incorporate these types of things into the network. After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with traditional financial services and financial products aside from the fact that they are based around inflationary centralized currencies that hold no true market value. Give us a free market and a decentralized currency and let us enjoy it and benefit from it. That is as difficult and complicated as it needs to be. Cheesy