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Decentralized Shipping Protocol: The Missing Link for a Truly Free Global Market
1033 sats \ 21 comments \ @klk 10 May bitcoin
Description: Just as Bitcoin enabled sovereignty over money, a decentralized shipping protocol would enable sovereignty over trade. An LN/Bisq inspired shipping protocol could create an unstoppable free market.
Bitcoin gave us monetary sovereignty, freeing us from central bank manipulation, inflation, and censorship. But there's a missing link in our freedom journey: the physical world of goods.
The Problem: Even with Bitcoin, global trade remains at the mercy of:
  • Arbitrary tariffs and import restrictions
  • Political censorship of goods
  • Privacy invasion of shipping information
  • Centralized shipping carriers
The Vision: A decentralized shipping protocol with these properties:
  • "Onion-routed" packages: Each carrier only knows the previous and next hop
  • Bitcoin-secured multi-sig escrow: Funds locked until package delivery confirmed
  • Incentive alignment: Carriers set their own fees based on risk assessment
  • Privacy tiers: Options for inspected vs. sealed packages with appropriate pricing
  • End-to-end sovereignty: Sender and receiver maintain control, intermediate carriers just fulfill their role
How it could work:
  1. Sender creates shipping request with package details and destination
  2. Protocol finds optimal route through independent carriers
  3. Each hop secured by multi-sig deposits larger than package value
  4. Carriers only see next hop, not ultimate destination
  5. Reputation systems and economic incentives maintain integrity
This creates a free market where any individual can participate as a carrier, earning Bitcoin for facilitating trade. Just like Lightning Network nodes, anyone can open "channels" with trusted partners.
Impact: This would enable true free market principles globally, making artificial trade barriers obsolete and empowering individuals to engage in voluntary exchange regardless of geographic or political boundaries.
There are a lot of challenges. But the first question is if this is a real problem and if its worth solving it.
What components would need development first? How would you solve the physical handoff challenges?
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10 sats \ 5 replies \ @Coinsreporter 10 May
a decentralized shipping protocol
And what's that? Hiding the names and addresses of the parties involved and get it delivered?
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @klk OP 10 May
That's only part of it. The most important part is the censorship resistance and the abstraction for the end user.
Currently, I could ship something to you through DHL only if I identify you and myself and if the goods are legal and pay all customs between us.
Ideally, we would be able to do that same thing without the identification, the customs, and potentially with illegal goods as well. An illegal good might just be a NVIDIA GPU in China.
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305 sats \ 3 replies \ @Coinsreporter 10 May
You can help a few people and fulfil some of the demands this way.
To make it work, Bitcoiners need to get organised and unite together. What you are talking about is gonna see many behind the bars.
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31 sats \ 1 reply \ @nerd2ninja 10 May
What you are talking about is gonna see many behind the bars.
Yeah my interest in this is pretty limited in scope to fixing trade with Nigeria. They have a high adoption rate, but are notoriously unreliable trading partners. A scheme that at least pays monetary damages for loss could make it worthwhile.
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310 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 10 May
Yeah my interest in this is pretty limited in scope to fixing trade with Nigeria.
At first, making this happen between two nations can be the way going forward with this. It can start like P2P shipping with intermediatery just depositing the parcel in a decentralised box. But then we also need a lot of infrastructure and service providers.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @klk OP 10 May
I don't have everything figured out, not even close. Take it as a random idea open for discussion.
Actually all of this already exists. A protocol would just standardize it and enable more people to use it.
And in the most simple example, it might just be a guy from your neighborhood delivering some homemade lasagna to your relative. But this way that delivery guy does not need to work for DoorDash/Uber Eats where he can only make fiat and get half of it stolen by his local government.
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15 sats \ 2 replies \ @OT 10 May
The first barrier that comes to mind are custom officers going through your package. If they can't get into it they'll likely send it back or destroy it.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @klk OP 10 May
That's why there should be two modalities of snipping:
  • Traditional parcels that can be inspected by each hop or “authorities”. Silk road worked through that just by assuming that there's a percentage of packet loss, in which case it's just shipped again. The “advantage” here is that it just affects illegal goods, and illegal goods have such a big margin that they can assume the over cost of that package loss probability.
  • Sealed ones that would not go through customs. They would have to be smuggled through each border that they pass. But this is already the case for drugs and similar, just that it would become accessible for anyone.
In any case, the point would be to use whatever infrastructure and methods that exist today, just in a decentralized way and with clear costs for each hop. Enabling economic calculation and a source of Bitcoin income for the intermediaries.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 10 May
My wife used to work in foreign trade. Some parts are similar to your proposal like when the customer orders the product they pay a 30% deposit. When it's shipped and the customer has the tracking details the final 70% needs to be paid.
Some of the bigger customers never pay a deposit and even pay after receiving the goods.
I think with using Bitcoin for bulk orders an onchain multisig wallet between the factory, distributor and customer might work well.
Smaller orders with LN might need more of an escrow model where the distributor holds funds. There are hold invoices but I think shipping is usually for longer time frames (weeks/months) which I don't think is ideal.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @nerd2ninja 10 May
If you think about it, thats what a lot of my alt-net posts enable (although I was tailoring it to data, a lot of delivery methods were pretty physical)
#330735
Take a look at it.
Take IPN for example
ipn:node_number.service_number
The rest of the contact graph is only interested in the time it takes to reach each node, but only the sender needs to know where to deliver to each reciever.
The service number could be used to define that we're delivering a package rather than data. That way we aren't routed through nodes that only do data transmission.
I do believe if we really think through this, it would be possible to come up with something.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @klk OP 10 May
Very cool concept!
In fact alt-net might be an easier win and more important than physical goods to begin with.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @anon 10 May
I love this idea, and have always thought that it would be easiest solved at the citadel/community level.
My solution was to use public private key pairs as identification. So the shipper ships the goods to a plain text community hub but the recipient's name is a pub key.
The community hub receives packages for several/many people and simply sorts them into amazon drop box style lockers which are opened via the true recipient's private key via QR.
The level of privacy grows with the size of the community using the service.
This seems more feasible to implement than a what you are describing, albeit not as epic lol.
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175 sats \ 0 replies \ @klk OP 10 May
Maybe that's the starting point. Would be really cool to see an Amazon style locker but owned by a Bitcoiner in the middle of nowhere. With no one for the cops to ask for explanations, only a QR scanner to open each locker :-)
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85 sats \ 3 replies \ @Signal312 10 May
Interesting idea. But I wonder if shipping/import/export is a good place to introduce this type of free market.
The reason is that importing is historically among the first places that taxes were introduced, in the form of tariffs.
Why is this? Because it's one of the easiest places to "earn" tax money. Goods are coming in from afar, to a port or over a bridge, and there's a chokepoint that you can control and tax.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @klk OP 10 May
That's a good point. Interesting how ports introduce a form of centralization and it got exploited...
But maybe precisely because of that an incentive to skip ports/hubs should be introduced. For example, if the tax is 100% of the good's price, it should make economical sense to go around the port.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Signal312 10 May
I wonder if drone powered delivery would be a way to circumvent this chokepoint.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @klk OP 10 May
Certainly! Or many other ways that we can't even think about.
If the economic incentive is there, solutions will flourish.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Jerrian_thedeep 10 May
Bitcoin gave us monetary freedom, but shipping is still centralized and vulnerable. I’d love to see a decentralized protocol where anyone can be a carrier, with privacy and trustless delivery built in.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @klk OP 10 May
bot...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @63350fa578 21h freebie
Bitcoin is the best thing that could have happened 🧡⚡
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @coinhome 10 May freebie
This is one of those ideas that feels ahead of its time—but absolutely necessary. Sovereignty over trade is the natural next step. The vision is bold, but so was Bitcoin once. Count me curious and hopeful.