With localmonero shutting down, what would be the challenges of creating a federated version of localmonero? Traders and buyers can have accounts at different servers but still be able to trade each other and see each others’ listings.

The pros i can see are: It would be harder to stop without a single point of failure, and brave server maintainers can host their services in different jurisdictions to prevent legal troubles. And it would be very difficult to prosecute server admins, as they aren’t the creator but merely hosting a site.

  • g2devi
    3·
    2 months ago

    Since you’re not asking about Haveno, the key question is, what are you trying to federate and what do you mean by localmonero?

    This is what I liked about localmonero: (1) It had an easy to use web site – this can be federated over onion; (2) it had many options (especially necessary if you’re not using USD or EUR) – federation reduces liquidity per mistance; (3) It had a reputation system for sellers – this is hard to federate; (4) The arbiters have been proven over time to be trustworthy – this may be impossible to federate without a reputation system.

    So, IMO, your first task is to come up with a federated trust system for both arbiters and sellers. Once you have that, listings and trading can happen on any platform, even lemmy or nostr or Simplex or Haveno or something like robosats.

    In my simpleminded approach, a wallet public key could have multiple reputations associated with it (e.g. seller, buyer, arbiter). There would have to be a way to confirm that sellers actually “sold” and “buyers” actually bought and arbiters actually arbitrated…I’m sure this could be done in a hidden ZK way by adding transaction IDs to the reputation . Could this be abused since a person can create multiple wallets and trade with himself? Sure, but that could also be done in localmonero and it did fall apart.