A membership fee might be counterproductive, especially since this kind of stuff benefits from the network effect. Information wants to be free, it's hard to get people to pay for it.

People use craigslist for free peer discovery. But it makes its money by selling special ads that rise to the top of search listings. That covers craigslist's server costs.


I've checked and it seems on The Marketplace almost all trades are ended by arbitrator and seller together signing a transaction, the buyer is merely expected to click Finalize on the page after receiving their drugs. The commission-on-every-trade model is easy to enforce then if the buyers are not technically competent or interested, but I wonder what happens after easy-to-use multisig wallets are released.

What we need: a graph showing the number of transactions to and from 2-of-3 multisig addresses plotted against time.