Though I don't use eBay much myself, I think this is a great idea (especially if you can make it use a two party escrow system for the payment).

Although the other two posts are very similar they both use block chains. I don't see why you need block chains for a web of trust.

This is what I propose for rating other account;

Each peer has one or more accounts;

Each account has a list of info about other accounts including ratings and comments.

Account rating is determined by spidering the other accounts on the network, and calculate the rating in much the same way google calculates pagerank. 

So if someone else’s account has given you a bad rating, it wouldn’t carry much weight unless their account had a good rating itself.

If you mean where is all the info regarding items for sale then there are two ways of doing this, as far as I can see.

First is the simple way. When you want to sell something you add that item to your offer database which is stored locally.   You receive search queries from other peers and return them any relevant offers. When you want to buy something then you send out a search across the network and you get all the relevant results returned from the other peers.

The downside of this method is that you can’t sell anything unless your client is connected.

The second way is to use a distributed database but this is more complicated and would probable be overkill for a first prototype. But, it would not be necessary to keep historical data after exchange has been completed, and so, no need for it to be incorporated into a block chain.

agree with you on the local storage of your items for sale, downside included

what about the trusted otc data on peers, secure time-stamp messaging, fingerprints of PGP pub keys and other things i cannot think of right now. Dunno maybe we could come with a better idea that Satoshi already did, you start the brainstorming...

To make an auction system work you need a few things:

First, there needs to be a fair cost.  Make it totally free and yes you get a bump in traffic, but a ton of junk listings.  You do not want that.  Make listings cost 10 cents.  (1 cent to 25 cents??) You also get people scamming by just creating fake listings and selling (not really selling just saying so) them to themselves and giving good feedback to multiply accounts owned by one person.

You should charge a 1% (.1 - 2%?) final value fee.  You need to make money to keep the site running.  This fee also dissuades scammers.  Most real sellers do not mind paying 1% to someone who gives them a good service.

If you make it too expensive, no one will use it.

Second, you should be involved in the payments.  It is harder to do, but it also dissuades scammers.  You should recieve the BTC, and REQUIRE a tracking #.  Check the tracking # for travel and matching the zip codes of the buyer and seller.  This is also hard.  But can be done manually at least initially.  Release money on the delivery of the item.  It is not a perfect system.  It can be scammed.  But it is much better for both buyer and seller then what is out there in the BitCoin world.  

Then you need a feedback system.  Something like ebay used to be, with negative and positive available to buyer and seller.  

You can't make everyone happy.  People with virtual items, or say that they do not want to give out that much information will not like it.  But long term I think honest buyers and sellers would like it.  



 

So are there any other developers willing to work with me on this, as part of a collaborative effort?

What server? I don’t remember mentioning a server.

How it works is by querying your already trusted nodes, you do not query the target node.

What is returned by the nodes is a tree, the root of that tree is the node being queried and each leaf of that tree is a node that has rating and comments about target node.

The relevance of that tree is factored by how much you trust the node that returned it.

As you do not query the target, pointing to themselves would not get them anywhere. They would need several good paths from you to them thought a network of already trusted nodes.

Sellers trying to establish a good rating can state escrow as one of their accepted payment methods.

a simple decentralized OTC will do. Should have the ability to store nick,pub key fingerprint and rating for every person and listings of goods and services. OTC market works letting every one give ratings from -10 to +10, where -10 is a scammer and +10 close friend.
The hard work would be on the GUI, to achieve a nice user experience, having to make at the same time sorting and filtering on the blockchain of huge amounts of info.

Good post.

Seriously, what is the deal with everything needing to be p2p? The currency is, that solves most of the issues. Ebay is popular because it works well and is a great system for auctions. What does negative feedback accomplish when all you have to do is create a new "account" with some ridiculous p2p system that has all sorts of ways to be gamed? Every single aspect of life cannot be anonymous and decentralized. sheesh.