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?
sure so i am talking about fungibility. should have been more specific.
Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. For example, since one ounce of gold is equivalent to any other ounce of gold, gold is fungible.
the asset exchange lends its self to fungible assets. ounces of weed are typically not very fungible.
OK. Basically, what you are saying is that the AE is not set up to sell things as singular assets; You can't sell 57 Chevies, Rare Collectables, art work, ETC. Is it a characteristic of the AE programing that sets this limit, or is this usage limitation designed to reduce and control the number of assets that can be listed on the AE for the sake of organization?
well its not that you cant.
technically you could issue 1 asset for many different 57 chevies but then customers would be weary of using it since they wouldnt know exactly what they were getting for their money. meaning they would tend to only be willing to bid the value of a 57 chevie in the worst condition imaginable. meaning it would be a terrible way to sell a 57 chevie in decent condition and would tend to end up representing only the crummiest ones because there is some heterogeneity in 57 chevies that are only worth their weight in scrap.
or you could issue 1 asset for each 57 chevie but it would be a huge waste of resources.
cfb is working on a blockchain marketplace, that would be the place to sell 57 chevies.
it could be very useful for chevrolette corporation to issue 10000 units of 1 asset that represents brand new 2014 chevies though. that would make a lot of sense. it would even allow them to get a better idea of what the market clearing price is for their product in a way that they cant get with guessing and then shipping them out to dealerships with a price tag that represents that guess.