Hi everyone!
Due to the somewhat delicate matter of this post, I just registered this account.
I am a long time customer of Silk Road (SR) and its follower (Sheep Market, Silk Road 2.0). SR made over 1.2 billion in revenues. There are several voices who claim that it was SR who made Bitcoin popular. In the last months there were several major drawbacks for these kind of markets: The Bitcoins of the vendors / customers got stolen either from hackers or the platform itself. Of course after such bad experience especially the vendors do not want to trust their funds to an anonymous platform since there are huge trust issues involved. Desperately they are looking for an alternative solution. The Asset Exchange could solve this problem for the vendors.
What they need is (beside the obvious):
1. The setup of their products must be easy
a. Description
b. If possible pictures
2. Message system
3. Easy Payment
To address the demands of the customers. The following criteria must be met:
1. Easy access
2. Ratings of the vendor
3. Message System
4. Easy Payment
Will the NXT AE be ready for that?
Needless to say if this is working there mustnt be a lot of marketing and new investors / vendors / customers would naturally come into NXT. Result would be full order books and a price explosion.
please dont do this on our blockchain. the last thing i want is the feds breathing down my neck. the code is open source go fork it and make SilkRoadCoin.
but in answer to your question, technically, yes, a blockchain could be used to solve these problems. not asset exchange though. thats not what asset exchange is for. its for trading homogeneous resources not heterogeneous resources. "weed" for example is heterogeneous so weed colored tokens wouldn't work well in the asset exchange. what you want to do is outline a protocol for interpreting arbitrary messages in a way that is relevant to running a marketplace not an asset exchange.
Anon, could you explain what you mean by homogenous/ heterogeneous and explain the difference when it comes to functionality of the AE?