How many of you would use a legal version of Silk Road?

So I’ve been working on what is essentially a legal version of Silk Road. Or a crypto version of ebay, if you will. You can buy and sell physical items using all the major cryptocurrencies. My focus in on great UX, and to accomplish this, it’s centralized where it doesn’t count, and decentralized where it does count.

• Where decentralization doesn’t count: app infrastructure. I don’t think people really care about this, and full decentralization is an uphill battle when it comes to UX. Take IPFS for example (which OpenBazaar used), the P2P nature of file sharing causes images to load super slow. Why should people care if images on listings are coming from a P2P network, or a centralized server?
• Where decentralization counts: Payments. People want a place to spend their crypto. It’s that simple.

My thinking is that people don’t care about sites pretending to be 100% decentralized, as OpenBazaar was (which is now dead). Although OB had big aspirations for decentralization, there was many points of centralization which required trust regardless e.g. …

• Moderators that resolved escrow
• Search - which is compute and data intensive, which means centralized servers are controlling what items get the most visibility
• Code - while the code is open source, it’s developed by a small team that decides the direction of the project. They controlled the official release and updates.

Anyway, I point all this out to underline the fact that even if you go max decentralization (as OB did), you still have several necessary points of centralization. And even just one of those could create a breach of trust. So I’ve dispensed with the maximalist decentralized approach and instead focused on decentralization where it matters most: payments. Imagine a second-hand marketplace just like ebay which took hundreds of crypto currencies as a payment method.

This is what I have in mind …

• Payment in hundreds of cryptocurrencies. Pretty much anything that is available for trade on Coinbase, since I will be using Coinbase Commerce to accept payments. CC really is a game changer because you no longer need to run your own nodes to conduct transactions on a blockchain. It’s the difference between needing millions to build this thing, or merely needing hundreds. CC can be what paypal was to ebay’s early success. Items are prices in BTC (the reserve currency of the crypto world) and USD (the reserve currency of the fiat world). Buyer can pay in a large variety of currencies and seller ultimately receives in USDC (after CC converts).
• Rewards for early adopters. I’ll mint a utility token that can be used for perks on the site. e.g. to boost listings, renew listings and pay listing fees. Early users that successfully complete transactions (both buyer and seller) receive large quantities of this token as a reward for early adoption. Because let’s face it, you really do have to go out on a limb to try a new service. And early users will be a large part of the site’s success, so it makes sense to reward them generously. As the site grows in adoption, rewards lower exponentially. e.g. you might receive 1000 tokens per dollar per successful transaction (both buyer and seller), the first months after launch. And after 6 months or a certain threshold of active users, that reward might lower to 100, then 10, etc.
• Escrow (of course), and in the traditional way. Seller sends the item. Buyer acknowledges receipt. Funds are sent from escrow to seller.
  
• Focus on great UX. The entire checkout process has to be simple and easy to understand. Like Amazon. Every purchase should be only a few clicks away.
• No stock photos. Lots of these ebay-like sites, ebay itself, and even craiglist suffer from major spam problems. We need to have 100% of items be real. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to ban all stock photos. You must take the picture of the item yourself.
• The marketplace fee will be 5% and will pay for the entire thing. Plus a 30 cent listing fee which is taken out of the seller side if the item sells. This undercuts pretty much every major marketplace out there, as 10% is typically on the low end. The site needs to make money in any case, otherwise it just goes the way OB did for lack of funding.
• 100% legal. Not interested in "fighting the man" here. The way we fight the man is by having control over our own money. We don't need to sell illegal drugs to make that happen. I think a lot of people are interested in using crypto for small, second-hand completely legal item purchases.
• One problem I do foresee is international shipping. So there would essentially be two versions of the site: Europe and North America with completely separate inventories, to get around the fact that it’s completely impractical and not cost effective to ship between 2 continents.

The goal here is simply to have a place where people can spend their crypto legally… because right now most people just keep it as a speculative investment. But I think a lot of people are dying to do stuff with it… yeah, I’m talking about the mythical, long-prophesied adoption here. Granted you can use crypto as a payment method on many sites now, but it's not streamlined, it's more a tacked-on added feature, rather than part of the ethos of the service. No one wants amazon or ebay with Bitcoin payments tacked on (which you need to go through a hundred steps to do). They want a site built from the ground up with crypto payments as the foundation. I think ethos matters.

My background: I am a senior web software engineer, with a background in building website infrastructure that scales to millions of DAU. I know how to scale and build a great UX. Eventually I’ll dox myself but you’ll just have to take my word for it for now. I’m planning to release an MVP in a few months.

Show of hands, how many of you guys would actually use something like this?