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I am thinking of creating a decentralized market place with public bidding. AS far as I have researched all cryptocurrencies and such only offer public ledgers with simple orderbooks. The only data about the item you are exchanging is value like BTC->USD or USD->BTC.

I was hoping to have a decentralized public market for more complex products which have many properties (let's call them CPU, memory, bandwidth, storage and lease time). In this case, you would not bid against a single value (price), but define the acceptable parameter ranger for your bid e.g. 30x units with > 512 MB memory, 1 MBit/s bandwith at the price of 1 USD/unit.

Then the ledger would go through the offers and match ones available on the market. Then trade parties would exchange private keys, so that the buyer would get the access to the item. I have no idea yet how, but probably the buyer would have an encryption key in the bid and if the bid goes through then the seller would encrypt a reply to the buyer using this key (the buyer can only decrypt).

As I am still in early phases of my research, I was wondering is there any prior art in this kind of crypto markets? Preferably the ledger data and the orders are public in consensus or blockchain, so that the there is no single point of failure in the system.

Thus far I have researched

  • NXT
  • Stellar
  • Bitshares X
  • OpenBazaar (this looks promising but orders and inventories are not decentralized ATM)
  • Ethereum (well this one is still much in baking)
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  • 'cryptocurrencies and such only offer public ledgers with simple orderbooks' ledgers are not order books. Crypt I currencies don't offer order books. Exchanges do.
    – Jannes
    Commented Sep 25, 2014 at 16:47
  • Here is one example of a cryptocurrency offering a ledger and orderbook stellar.org/api/#api-book_offers
    – Mikko Ohtamaa
    Commented Sep 25, 2014 at 19:49
  • Another example: wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/Bitshares_X#Claim_by_Bid
    – Mikko Ohtamaa
    Commented Sep 25, 2014 at 19:51
  • Looks like an API to a centralized exchange server. Just like any bitcoin exchange. But I might be wrong, I don't care for altcoins. Bitcoin and most (all?) forks do not provide order books. They may have exchange built around them but those are not part of the coin and usually (always) centralized. For an orderbook to be part of the coin it would need to be done in a p2p network where there is no central party taking matching decisions. So matching would need to be done via a blockchain consensus mechanism.
    – Jannes
    Commented Sep 25, 2014 at 21:29
  • Thank you for your comment. If you find anything which contributes to the answer and which you think I am not aware of yet, please let me know.
    – Mikko Ohtamaa
    Commented Sep 25, 2014 at 22:25

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I think Ethereum is ideal for this. As you say, it's not ready for prime time yet. But I think it offers the most flexible toolkit for managing orders in a truly decentralized way. You can create and manage arbitrary database structures that are secured on the blockchain.

I wrote a toy digital artwork market using Ethereum -

http://robmyers.org/2014/07/24/ethereum-art-market/

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