Show HN: Retail Store that runs on Ethereum

https://github.com/brakmic/BlockchainStore

by brakmic • 9 years ago

99 61 9 years ago

1ba9115454• 9 years ago

This first thing that popped into my head was Silk Road.

Cthulhu_• 9 years ago

But with the store itself running in the blockchain (I think that's how it works), so it's a lot harder for the FBI and co to infiltrate and take down. Of course, they could instead create legislation that illegalizes the use of Ethereum or any similar blockchain technology.

openasocket7• 9 years ago

There's a much simpler solution. Cops sell drugs on the market. Sellers have to physically mail the drugs to the customer, so they need a mailing address. Then instead of mailing drugs they raid the house. Pretty easy. And to get sellers they can buy drugs and trace the drugs they bought back to the dealer.

The FBI may not be able to take down the entire store, but they don't have to.

rootsudo• 9 years ago

This was everyones first thought, I'd trust.

NwmG• 9 years ago

Check out openbazaar

openasocket7• 9 years ago

How does Ethereum help with retail? It's not like the smart contracts can verify that the customer has actually received the physical item.

mikeash4• 9 years ago

It would at least enforce agreement about what is being purchased and how much each item costs. Not getting what you purchased would still have to be resolved by other means, but it would avoid scenarios where I tried to buy something for $1 and got charged $5, or where I tried to buy 1 item and got charged for 10, or similar.

I don't know if that's enough to make it a compelling use case, but it's kind of cool.

root_axis8• 9 years ago

Seems like paypal accomplishes the same thing. I have to explicitly agree to be billed a specific amount through paypal's checkout process and it is not possible for the merchant to bill me again unless I explicitly agree to a recurring subscription (and even then, the recurrence is managed by the paypal subscription API, preventing the merchant from receiving any more funds than what I explicitly agreed to)

mjfl• 9 years ago

I think this is more to solve a problem with Ethereum (that it's hard to spend it on things) than to solve a problem with retail.

jtmarmon• 9 years ago

Doesn't this make it about 1000x harder to spend money on things with etherium?

Current status quo: you have to sell some etherium for USD to buy stuff. Every store accepts this.

Alternatively, you can only shop at stores that use this software (0)

xorcist• 9 years ago

Not Ethereum, but smart contracts have been demonstrated in Bitcoin to guarantee delivery of certain immaterial goods for which you can build specialized zero-knowledge proofs. You could for example buy cryptographic keys this way.

The idea has been around some time and was used to buy a Sudoku solution for a demonstration last year: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

openasocket7• 9 years ago

That only works for selling information, not physical products.

ThrustVectoring• 9 years ago

What? Yeah they can. Have an escrow that releases the sale price to the seller and additional security deposits to both parties when the buyer sends proof that they received a nonce shipped with the physical item. You can even add a refund mechanism by allowing the buyer to send back another nonce along with the returned item, which when redeemed returns all escrows back to whoever originally paid in.

recursive• 9 years ago

The buyer wouldn't receive the nonce until they received the physical item, at which time they could claim they did not receive it.

openasocket7• 9 years ago

That could work. But I think the nonce is redundant, the buyer just has to say they received it in an authenticated manner.

peculiar• 9 years ago

There is a saying that goes "If it's not broke, don't fix it". What problem are we solving here exactly by replacing a centralized Shopify / Amazon / E-bay by the solution you've described? Is it better from the common user's perspective?

dbrgn• 9 years ago

I would be terribly afraid to write a real world retail system in Solidity. One stupid mistake and all the money is gone, without much you can do about it.

And without formal verification, bugs are certain sooner or later.

SirensOfTitan2• 9 years ago

You could insulate here by simply transferring to a hardcoded user wallet at relatively frequent intervals (like once a day). Worst case then, you lose a day of sales.

scottshapiro• 9 years ago

Would you feel more comfortable with Javascript on Lisk?

mannykannot2• 9 years ago

No - that does not appear to solve the verification problem.

Moshe_Silnorin• 9 years ago

Security isn't graded on a curve. The crappiness of Lisk doesn't make Solidity any less crappy.

imcoconut• 9 years ago

Do you have any thoughts on tezos [0], which claims to have a formally verifiable language for its blockchain contracts?

[0] https://www.tezos.com/

euparkeria• 9 years ago

Interesting, i will try to fork this project to do a used clothes store(Brechó in portuguese).

joeyspn6• 9 years ago

This is so cool! I was starting to research the design of something like this...

The ERC20 token idea is also great, people then would have a reference implementation for their own tokens... it could unlock a new wave of DApps. Kudos!

AdamSC1• 9 years ago

I'm unclear - how is this different than an eCommerce system (say Shopify or WooCommerce) that had a plugin to accept Eth?

Is it just that the registrations are handled in contracts too?

jstanley• 9 years ago

Besides the web interface I'm planning to implement an ERC20 compliant token

Why??

rspeer• 9 years ago

In case people want to give him lots of money for no reason.

tuxxy2• 9 years ago

Ethereum will not scale.

/Every/ single node will have to run these contracts. Not your node, not ten distributed nodes, but /every/ node has to run the contract.

I wouldn't trust anything with my money that works this way.

SirensOfTitan2• 9 years ago

Ethereum will not scale.

I understand your not wanting to put your money into a bleeding edge technology, but there are /plenty/ of ways that Ethereum is working on the scaling problem:

1. Sharding and shard-based consensus algorithms are already in development and can be deployed after PoS hits. 2. Raiden offers scalability solutions for certain DApps.

ghayes• 9 years ago

Can't you also snapshot state and start with a genesis block that covers all transactions up to that checkpoint?

tuxxy2• 9 years ago

can be deployed after PoS hits.

Why is this considered a solution? All it does is formalize Vitalik's control over the network. If he doesn't like it, it gets forked.

Not to mention, do you know how few Ethereum nodes there are that /actually/ verify the contracts? Proof of Stake isn't going to incentivize anyone to execute the contracts on the scale that is needed to maintain this network. Sharding won't work if there aren't enough people to work with.

What about DoS contracts? I know for a fact, that I can write code to brick SSDs by writing as much as possible to them.

I honestly have no idea why anyone thinks joining into a botnet that allows arbitrary code execution is okay.

Furthermore, all it takes is a single vulnerability in the Ethereum VM to cause a chain split that could, theoretically, throw every node off.

Show HN: Retail Store that runs on Ethereum

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