Personalised Ads as P2P Bitcoin covenants to cultivate Trust into SN
1501 sats \ 5 comments \ @AGORA 9 Mar meta
zaps forwarded to @AG (36%)

A Bit of History recap
For centuries since the Egyptians, classified ads have served as a simple yet effective way to exclusively connect buyers and sellers. If you think about it, the first form of writing signs1 were made to materializes and keep track of commercial exchanges, writing as useful accounting tool. Later on, with the evolution of alphabets and numbers, from dusty newspapers to the digital haven like Craigslist, these listings have facilitated countless transactions and enabled an underground economy that most of the time plays out of the tyrannic eye of regulators. The amounts are usually small (because it's hard to build trust for bigger deals) so there's no real interest on wasting resources for few-bucks-transactions and try to eat on it. However, we are seeing more and more bigger players asking for light KYC data to post an ad: a phone number it's now a must to verify an account, and phone numbers are, in most of the cases, linked with an ID.
Always the same game of third parties, trying to diminish the inherent trust gap between strangers that usually creates friction and uncertainty. These are few of the various reasons why we are betting on P2P Bitcoin free market, we all know the others. On our side, we blindly trust Bitcoin, and the network of communities it is enabling and empowering. Bitcoin is already covering that function in and between communities to enable trust and a free and circular economy. SN particularly, is one of these communities and now even more, it enables a more sovereign way to manage funds in the platform, with the ability to connect directly to your own node or preferred wallet2.
As mentioned more times, this is, from our perspective, a prosperous ground for this free market to take place, offering a revolutionary solution for classified ads on Stacker News. It's inevitable, and it will come3.

The Trust Deficit: A P2P Conundrum
Trust, it take time to build it, and when broken, it's really hard to bond it back. Let's face it, the traditional classified ad system is ripe with potential pitfalls and you'll always find on any platform some sort of scam. A buyer might worry about receiving a broken product or facing a seller who disappears after receiving payment. Conversely, sellers fear encountering non-paying buyers or fraudulent transactions. If you think about that, Airbnb, was one of the first braking through this problem and enable seamless payments between guests and hosts. Once you set it up, you'll forget about paying during the flow and focus more on the conversation with the other party to make sure everything will go well. Their support team has probably a lot of work to do, but we all recognize the value that it has provided to the market.
Stacker News is no stranger to these challenges. We are an active community fostering innovation and constructive conversations, classified ads often require a leap of faith, especially for expensive or intricate items like buying a car, or hiring someone for a service, or renting a house. You'd trust SN community to find someone willing to go P2P?

SN to become the Hero: Enabling Covenants for Secure Transactions
And here is the hidden gem! Bitcoin covenants. This function of bitcoin could offer a unique solution that helps self-executing agreements, stored onchain, and transform classified ads on Stacker News into secure, automated transactions without the need of any third party. Still early days, but looking back, as humans we always tend, to merge technologies and make them more interoperable. Look at the iPhone, the first phone, that had a bunch of other functional apps that competitors were not even thinking about. So why should not personalized ads be merged with the technology that enable its payments itself?
Let's consider our latest Ad-post4 as an example and see how Covenants could automate Long-Term Rentals. Here's a glimpse into how it could look:
  1. Posting the listing and the contract agreement on SN, with length options, pictures and obviously including monthly rent, security deposit amount, lease duration (in this case 2 months) and --listen carefully to this--a detailed inspection report with photos stored onchain. Yes, you hear this right, ordinals could finally be used and serve a functional case!
  2. Covenant creation where owner and tenant directly sign the lease agreement (covenant) on Stacker News, maybe communicating via private DMs enabled by nostr. Once agreed upon, both parties electronically sign the lease agreement, which is then uploaded and linked to the covenant deployed on onchain.
  3. For security and Rent, the tenant locks a portion of the security deposit (e.g. 50%) and the total rent for the agreed lease term (minus the first month's rent). This ensures the long-term financial security for the landlord, that will sign accordingly after receiving a notification.
  4. Automated Payments for the rent is automatically deducted from the locked funds in the transaction, let's say on a weekly basis, and transferred to the landlord.
  5. Inspections, as stipulated in the lease, are facilitated through the platform. Both parties record the property's condition with photos and timestamps and, again, store the media files as ordinals.
  6. Maintenance requests could similarly work, but in this case it's more probable a new agreement need to be stipulated, together with a new evaluation for the repairs.
  7. When the lease completion date arrives the security deposit could return, if there are no outstanding issues or property damage claims, the covenant automagically releases the remaining security deposit back to the tenant.
  8. In case of any dispute, or disagreements that arise about property at the end of the lease, each party could bring the dispute resolution sharing it publicly with the community, for example with a poll (also powered by nostr) where stackers vote based on evidence provided by both parties. I know, it's a delicate topic!
Do you think this scenario is too far from us? Sci-fi? I agree this flow is probably oversimplified, and my lack of technical knowledge could make some affirmations a total nonsense. Any comment on this will be much appreciated.

A step forward into the Future for a secure P2P Circular Economy
There's no doubt challenges exist, applying covenants to classifieds on SN could be just one of the possible applications, with the potential to revolutionize online transactions, making them much more secure in the long term, trustless and transparent for everyone involved. Stacker.News ~AGORA marketplace and the community itself would enormously benefit about this feature. It could also attract new users, boost engagement, and solidify SN position as a leader in innovative online interaction in cypherspace.
I just wanted to share a useful case where Bitcoin covenants, with their ability to program restrictions on transactions, could come into play in a real life scenario. Stacker News, being a platform known for embracing of innovation, could potentially serve as a facilitator for such complex deals, but not be responsible for any issue between the parties. It's time to experiment, let's innovate and expand SN boundaries further! With practice and patience, we can ensure balanced result.
So a little summary for the TLDR lovers:
That's all, stackers!

MAY EVERY DEAL ₿RING JOY TO YOUR ~AGORA AD-VENTURES!

Footnotes
  1. The cuneiform script, created in Mesopotamia (today Iraq), ca. 3200 BC. From The Evolution of Writing on Utexas ↩
  2. SN release: NWC & LNBits for sending, LND for autowithdraw - but not many are using it yet! Guys, you are so far ahead of time! ↩
  3. @kr and @k00b discussed how self serve ads should work this week. #454844 by @AG ↩
  4. House for rent for Bitcoin! Tiny soi with a rural vibe at Bang Sue in Bangkok posted by @lightworks ↩
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1094 sats \ 1 reply \ @supertestnet 10 Mar

First of all
--listen carefully to this--a detailed inspection report with photos stored onchain
In the name of Kronk why would you do this? Why? What benefit is there to putting the photos on the blockchain?

Secondly
Covenants could automate Long-Term Rentals
Covenants ensure that an address can only send its contents to a set of whitelisted destinations, and in this case it seems like you want the whitelist to consist of (1) the landlord or (2) the tenant, where the choice ultimately comes down to (a) their agreement or (b) a stacker news poll.
Option (a) requires a 2 of 2 multisig, and that seems to eliminate any role for covenants. Bitcoin's multisig technology already lets two parties create an address together, agree on a set of destinations, and not let the money go anywhere else, simply by not signing to send the money anywhere else. Covenants let you do this without the action of a second party, but since your scheme requires two parties anyway, I don't think covenants add anything.
Covenants also don't help you achieve (b) which is the really hard part. Bitcoin doesn't know stacker news exists and has no built in way of responding to its polls. You could perhaps achieve something kind of similar by having the 50 most active stacker news contributors put their pubkeys in a big multisig script and require 26 signers to approve any movement of funds using that script. If every loan added that script to the lease contract, you could let those 50 people vote if the landlord and the tenant have a dispute.
But (1) this idea does not require covenants anywhere (2) it's not the same as using a *real* stacker news poll (3) I don't see how covenants can enable the latter.

Lastly
Your post uses the term "trust" throughout it and talks about how to "cultivate trust" by letting Stackers vote on stuff. It ends by calling this "trustless communities [with] SN as facilitator." This is entirely self contradictory. If you're trusting Stackers to vote honestly then your scheme is the very opposite of trustless. "Trustless" means "you don't have to trust anyone." What you're describing is literally "trusting many people" and you even say so. Please don't call things trustless after spending such a long time describing, explicitly, the opposite of trustless.
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196 sats \ 0 replies \ @AGORA OP 10 Mar
Firstly
In the name of Kronk, ahahah! You make my day with this! Anyway, I knew someone could fill triggered by these words, and that's why I put it in that way. Ordinals obviously are just an option, I did not say is the ideal one, not Ii think is the most sustainable. Your nostr image host solution could be much more efficient and useful. BTW I don't see why @SN should not implement it... or maybe is already there?
Secondly
You are right on this too, I probably forgot to mention the built-in multisig functionality that can definitely be used for each transaction in steps (1) and (2). My mention to covenants was explicitly to automate somehow the payments a long time, in this case on a weekly basis mentioned in step (3). What I'm assuming is that covenants interact on signed on-chain transactions and support it until the variables are filled.
Lastly
You are totally right. The "trustless" was obviously referring to the whole process of creating an Ad here on SN, and don't trust any third party to have the deal done. This excluding point (7). It wanted to be just an option and could be easily excluded from the process.
I'm not setting here the standing stones of the process, just an idea to build on and exchange opinions to make it available somehow. True is, I mixed many things together without knowing the working details of them, including the covenants.
Summarizing
  1. Ad-post created on SN together with an open agreement as onchain transaction signed by the creator (the owner in this case).
  2. The other parties validate information and its interest, signing the agreement
  3. Covenant is responsible to deliver the funds as established in the agreement (on a weekly basis for the next two months)
  4. This could be done before step (2) and at the end of the lease with ordinals or nostr-image-host or any other solution able to host images in a decentralized manned with timestamp and other relative metadata
  5. In case of any issue, a new agreement might need to be stipulated, so this will be a new multisig process linked to the original one but not able to break it.
  6. in the best case scenario, when everything goes well: owner receive the full amount initially agreed.
  7. This is a fully optional step, and if both parties do not find an agreement, I assume the first agreement will continue going until competition. If there's a disagreement, both parties should initiative a new dispute (contract), but this as well will be not affecting the original one.
Many of us probably are thinking: in two years, the value of bitcoin will be changing a lot! That's your problem, because you're still thinking on fiat terms. Fiat change value too.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @satoshiplanet 9 Mar
👀
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SaToSHiWoMaN 11 Mar outlawed
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SaToSHiWoMaN 10 Mar outlawed
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.