HI all. Long time safex holder here. I just wanted to stop by and ask a couple of questions.
In what way is safex censorship resistant? How will it remain in operation, once some politician or law enforcement agency, decides they don’t like it? This is bound to happen, if Safex and the marketplace become the spiritual successor to the old silk road.
Which is something Safex must do, otherwise there is no product market fit. Simply put, you don’t use a blockchain unless you need censorship resistance. That is the one and only reason it exists. For anything else (at all) you simply use a regular database which is much faster and more efficient than a blockchain. So I’m just asking how the marketplace will resist the inevitable censorship attempts that are coming. And how the team will resist this censorship as well. They may not be able to stop the software, but as we’ve seen in the past, they can lean on the development team and get them to take it down. They say “Hey, turn it off, or you’re going to jail.”
I realize all this has probably already been answered, so if anyone has a link, it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Safex is NOT attempting to create a replacement Silk Road.
Safex is a privacy coin. This means the contents of your wallet can only be seen if you hold the keys. So others can’t see what’s in your wallet when you send them your address, to receive a payment.
The raw blockchain is uncensorable and immutable, for sure.
But the TWMwallet the team is currently working so hard to release will only display curated offerings from verified vendors. It won’t be a free-for-all. Certainly NOT black market products.
The other privacy factor relates to purchases made on the marketplace. Unlike other e-commerce platforms (that harvest your data), on Safex marketplace, only the buyer and seller exchange minimal information needed to complete the tx. No other parties can ascribe purchases to a particular person, nor can they mine such data for their own gain.
The project is focussed on creating a clean marketplace for regular ppl to access legitimate products.
So everyone will be able to see what’s on offer. But only the buyer, and the seller will be able to see if anything was actually sold. Correct? So other people who viewed the item, will simply see it disappear once it is sold and the seller takes down the listing. And no one can ever tell who the buyer, or the seller was.
Everyone will be able to see items from vendors who have been verified for the API (which populates the Market of items shown in the wallet).
Where the quantity available is >1, and not all stock is sold in the one tx, then the quantity remaining will update. Everyone can see the quantity change.
Nobody can tell who bought what, other than the seller, who gets the necessary information to ship the product, etc.
to add: the blockchain accepts plain text descriptions, and the blockchain based essentials like price: which is connected to the purchase, feedback, price oracle, and the cash and token systems.
So this part is like any transaction: the offer listing, and anyone can query the blockchain to see the listings; however, to more nicely interact with the marketplace system we provide an open source API: github.com/safex/twmapi
This API stores its own database of the safex marketplace from the blockchain.
This API can be hosted by anyone, and people can navigate to the URL of that API instance. The API has an admin panel that lets you enable which users, and then which products from the blockchain will be served.
In this way the blockchain acts as the internet, and you can put your own “google” ontop of it and curate products OR use it personally and host your own instance of your own store.
The API also has the messaging system inside of it. So essentially you can control your own data entirely with your customers. If you use the public API that we will launch initially like all other instances, messages are asymmetrically encrypted with the seller’s public key so that means no one can read the messages coming through the API except who is the recipient.
Same with the buyer, with every purchase the wallet generates a new set of keys to communicate with the seller.
Blockquote The project is focussed on creating a clean marketplace for regular ppl to access legitimate products.
We’ve already got more of that than we’ll ever need. Amazon works great. Putting amazon on a blockchain is doomed since we already have amazon, not on a slow inefficient blockchain. All blockchains are slow and inefficient compared to normal databases which are designed for speed and don’t have to care about privacy.
So the main appeal of safex is that nobody knows who either the buyer or the seller is. Unlike Amazon, you won’t be tracked and nobody will know who bought and sold what. Does that sound about right?
That’s enough, I can see people flocking to the safex marketplace if they’re going to get that kind of anonymity.
Thanks for the reply Dan! Much appreciated. I’ve been holding safex for years and will be holding for 10 more years!
I can think of a lack of cross border restrictions to add as well.
Also where there is restriction on products going from one country to another. In both these instances Safex will have it over Amazon and Ebay.
Oh yeah…Fees.
The products should be quite lower in price compared to amazon, etc. The fees amazon can take are enormous. Not only that amazon doesn’t give you money back. On Safex the 5% fee of marketplace sales are given back to holders of Safex Tokens. At least in America there has been a limit on products you can buy in a store because of COVID-19, and since safex is decentralized that won’t be a problem.
Glad to hear you @bennylava, the other very compelling reasons, and in the first place: Safex is a cryptocurrency powered marketplace, and what you mentioned about the blockchain being slow vs database…
Since with Safex as a seller you get Safex Cash crypto directly to your wallet at the moment of each and every sale you make. So in comparison to virtually every other form of payment and every other platform. You must request your money, and wait for it to arrive to your accounts. That will slow you down in your next maneuvers.
Also the amazons, ebays’ paypals… etc can withhold your funds, indefinitely for any reason at all.
These are some of the most compelling reasons. Keep in mind mentioned before, with a fee of 5% versus 15% + ; the idea is that you can list products for cheaper than they are found on Amazon and etc… so this means that you can advertise and compare prices, people will want to flock to the discounts any time.
My take away here and replying the topic, I see TWM biggest value is that is “censorship resistant” (albeit not 100% censorship-proof and for good reasons stated above), more so that other similar platforms (i.e. Amazon, Ebay, Mecado Libre, Alibaba, etc). Those have way more regulatory aspect to them and have, and will continue to, make decisions on your business practice of selling (including fees).
Not all technologies are meant to be a replacement, so TWM brings a fresh alternative to those that want to have reduced risk in terms of their entire sales model being halted due to whatever reason it is that moment.
@thinker you made me think further the novelty of the TWM API.
If in some country let’s say Arabia where alcohol is banned, over there no whisky sales so any API that is serving that area, won’t host alcohol.
However, that lets other API instances to host the alcohol for the world that does allow selling alcohol online.
So the system should prove itself quite viable, the strategy of this 2nd layer curation to cater to the target markets. Each API has its own URL so it can independently promote to the target markets it wants, and promote and sell the products there.
This is literally, the internet for ecommerce.
Wow. blowing my own mind right now. This is real and in play.
hi
learning more but got me thinking of ways people to get around it
so anyone can list ANY products they want on the blockchain just not in TWM app as TWM app will filter out black market items, but since its open source…
could someone copy paste TWM app code, set their own filter to ‘show all products’ on the blockchain including black market items?
and then this one interests me and i guess everyone else holding SFT to get rev share
since they have their own TWM app with ‘no filter’ on products, if the rev share is higher on this black market app, would people not simply stake their SFT on this app instead of TWM app original?
how does the staking work? is it done through TWM app ONLY for the filtered products shown in the app or the full blockchain of products sold regardless if they are shown in TWM app?
The way it works right now in the TWM pre-release wallet: Anyone can create an account and list anything they want (= submit a create safex offer transaction). Then, they can register their vendor account on the API, which means: The API provider will allow the vendor account’s listing to show up in the offer list that is made up by the API - or he will not. If you are a vendor and the API registration was successful/allowed, your listings will show up in that list for everyone else - otherwise, you will only see the listings yourself.
Staking and unstaking is a transaction type on the core protocol level. There is no differentiation made or possible. If you stake, you will collect fees made up by all sales transactions that are taking place on the blockchain - it does not matter in this case whether those were part of an API filtered/registered list or not.
To sum it up: The API in the TWM wallet is just a filter that is laid on top of the data which is pulled from the original blockchain to display only selected data. Transactions itself (send cash/token, create/edit account, create/edit offer, stake/unstake) are working the same (=result in the same outcome) in the TWM app as in a CLI wallet.
I’ve been holding safex for years and will be holding for 10 more years!
