Is there still no way to make an offer and have it available for others to view when you go offline?
I understand this is very difficult to do in a decentralised manner, but I feel this problem is halting Dark Exchange's community growth.
It is quite clear that when people log on only to find themselves online, thus no offers, it makes it look like you have entered an empty hall expecting a bustling market. If this happens I believe more people will use it.
My suggestion is to have some kind of 'pass-the-parcel' technique where a node locally stores tgeir offers, and before it logs off it passes those offers to any online nodes before logging off, and thatnode does the same thing, and so on.
When a node comes back online, it can reclaim those offers so that it can broadcadt them itself.
Any thoughts?
There is still no way to make an offer and have it available when you go offline. The 'pass-the-parcel' technique likely won't work since you don't really log off, but just disconnect from the network.
How about every node in the system keeps track of every offer (for now, only a subset in the future). If you're not online, it doesn't matter, someone somewhere has your offer. It would get tricky to keep track of the offers as they are accepted/rejected, but it would be possible.
Would that work for you?
Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to work on Dark Exchange lately. I'm in the middle of adding a trust score to the system. When I have that in, I can look into something like this and fixing other issues.
I didn't realize there was still so much interest in the project.
Yeah, I think this is the best idea so far. That way as long as there is one person who is online they can act as a server to start with. As the community grows it will be more distributed.
If private/public key signing was used then we can guarantee who made the offer and who accepted the ofefer. For example an accepted offer can be timestamped so that whenever somebody.accepts an offer that has already been made the accepted offer is rejected.
Ideally the objective is for a critical mass of nodes are always online making sure the orderbook is always up-to-date.