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Centralized services enables commerce at scale, and that web of trust grows just like the silk road, alphabay, airbnb, and coinbase.
Sure, you can buy some weed from your neighbour with a private Lightning payment from your Phoenix wallet to his Wallet of Satoshi and that has increased the overall network effect utility of Lightning as a medium of exchange for the purposes of commerce.
However, that's not massive scale and adoption like the silk road. The internet facilitates scale, and darkweb markets enable that.
A nostr-based Lightning marketplace could be cool, but the point of a darkweb marketplace is that there's some trusted intermediary that reduces counterparty risk.
If everything is peer to peer and there is no protections, there needs to be some reputation system or dispute resolution mechanism to reduce risk and coordinate trade.
Both alphabay and silk road acted as trusted custodial escrow systems in order to facilitate trade.
Is there even a darkweb market that supports Lightning today? Like in production, operational, facilitating commerce? Bitcoin does this for sure. But if there's no Lightning facilitated marketplaces then Lightning doesn't even compare to pure L1 on-chain Bitcoin.
How long could you operate a large Lightning node for the purposes of facilitating commerce on the scale of the silk road. Let's say you are the LSP to a self-custodial Lightning marketplace on nostr and enable users to deposit funds into their self-custodial Lightning wallet, and trades are escrowed somehow. Wouldn't it be trivial for the feds to take down the node and loot the funds?
Centralized services enables commerce at scale
No, that's retarded. Centralization is a cheat code to UX perhaps, but not scale.
web of trust grows just like the silk road, alphabay, airbnb, and coinbase
Web of Trust is the reputation of any given participant.
SR and that other shit are not Web of Trust, they're individual participants, the reputation they give to a seller is only in THEIR view. They themselves are an individual participant in an open market for any number of things.
You can rent a vacation house from countless places, you choose AirBNB because of your trust in them as an escrow and their rankings of others.
Now imagine a decentralized AirBNB, where who you rent a vaction house from is based on people you actually know leaving reviews for owners they rented from. Perhaps a new property comes up without a reputation, you don't trust the owner, so you and the owner agree to have a mutual connection escrow.
but the point of a darkweb marketplace is that there's some trusted intermediary that reduces counterparty risk
That's an escrow. Any market built around a centralized escrow will fail.
silk road acted as trusted custodial escrow systems in order to facilitate trade
Yes and that was fucking stupid.
even a darkweb market that supports Lightning today?
Telegram, Signal, Nostr... WooCommerce... anything that facilitates encrypted comms on the internet.
The idea a "darkweb market" is a centralized thing is moronic LARP. Completely wrong mental model.
How long could you operate a large Lightning node for the purposes of facilitating commerce on the scale of the silk road.
There are countless large lightning nodes and LSP's doing a ton of volume, what that volume is for nobody knows. That's the point. Every user uses them differently.
As a buyer or seller, you can connect to as many of them as you want... or a s few as you want. And as a seller you never need reveal your node to anyone, as a buyer nobody knows who you're paying or what for.
Wouldn't it be trivial for the feds to take down the node and loot the funds?
They can arrest certain actors, that's why decentralization is all that matters. If you dox yourself doing something stupid that warrants their attention then yes they'll come to your house, break your shit, and coerce you into giving up your keys... but you're just one participant in the market, the market itself will endure.
they are not darknet but ive seen noncompliant commerce in research chemicals and unscheduled pharmaceuticals use lightning
Encrypted comms on internet is the darknet. Your idea of what a darknet is is the problem.
You want a centralized board, with a centralized escrow, centralized reputation, call that a dark market, and wonder if there's a payment solution to make that not a time-bomb.
Any response to this at all was generous, you got 3.
Lightning is the only L2, period. Everything else is a centralized affinity scam / compliance scam - run by a company that monetizes custodial services and Lightning swaps... and that centralization makes them a surveillance chokepoint.
Lightning is the most private option possible, given its large anonset, true decentralization, and relatively infrequent use of the chain... a chain which has immutable physics making Lightning emergent and everything else a pretender.
This would be a design flaw for the market, this AI slop post assumes a darkweb market itself needs to be the custodian (escrow).
That central point of failure will always fail, it's not a payment problem.
A market is a network of individuals. This means in a true "dark" market each user is running their own node (or has access to an array of completely unrelated custodians).
In this way, Lightning is already succeeding for private markets, there's just no centralized larp board associated with it. People stand up their own pages and sell shit, no one knows about payments between the buyer and the seller. It's done and working.
Since markets are decentralized, there is no single node to associate with such a market. Blinded paths mean no node need be associated with a given seller. There's nothing for exchange Lightning nodes to block, everyone is just a node with an optionally ephemeral key.
A market in the centralized sense as you describe, is just a place where you find other people to transact with. Escrow are just another service to buy or sell, thus must also be decentralized like any other market participation.
Again, it's not a payment payment privacy problem, it's privacy larping problem by people that still think the Silk Road was a good idea.
You can use Nostr or any other type of encrypted DM to do business, a buyer and a seller can agree on any 3rd party for escrow. Stand up a website or social page, offer products or services... don't have a reputation? Rent someone elses to act as escrow.
The solution you're looking for is Web of Trust and an advertising board, things Nostr is good at and getting better. Lightning already solved the payments side and is hooking into Nostr more every day.