What lessons can people learn from localmonero's legal experiences?

I just discovered that localmonero is run by a legal entity called Blue Sunday Limited.

I’m thinking of creating an online market that directly handles a few privacy cryptocurrencies like monero but can also handle all currencies indirectly. Think of cragslist that can handle a few cryptocurrencies directly. I’m doing this to show people a decentralized model to run a crypto market. In the near future, the model can be used by anyone who has enough computer experience to run wordpress on VPS.

I don’t want to create a legal entity. The purpose is to decentralize market place with privacy cryptocurrencies like monero.

Why would localmonero require a legal entity in the first place? Does it require a legal entity because it directly interfaces with the established financial system? Or, does it require a legal entity simply because police officers threatened to physically arrest or beat up localmonero founders? Or, did police officers threaten to take down localmonero.co domain or launch DoS attacks on localmonero? Or, did localmonero users expect localmonero to work under governments?

By learning from localmonero, people can better resist government mandates.

Interesting point Manchuria. I’m pretty sure the main reason they are a legal entity is to be legally in the clear in the case of a crackdown due to the use of local monero. You also have to keep in mind the different payment methods used on this site, like bank accounts, paypal etc, that all are directly tied to the financial system. I’m interested in your proposal for a decentralized marketplace for private cryptocurrencies, but my one concern is how would disputes be handled in such a marketplace. Assuming that customers use the same method to turn their usd to xmr, and vendors want that same payment method, how would a dispute/scam be resolved. The main reason this site is centrlaized is mainly to just be an intermediary, but their mostly hands off, letting the customer interect directly with the vendor. This is obviously a trust issue, but its probably the most decentralzied we can get when it comess to trading fiat to crypto. Although I am interested in how such a decentralized market would play out and I hope you follow through with it.

Combine a forum with a cryptocurrency escrow software. Anyone can run a forum software and a cryptocurrency escrow.

The forum can serve as a cryptocurrency exchange when it’s combined with cryptocurrency escrow.

The escrow software would have arbitrators who resolve disputes. Nowadays, you can rent domain names and VPS with monero without revealing any personal information.

I think Local Monero is legal in the sense that The Pirate Bay is legal in a lot of jurisdictions at least. If they ran a trade from one person to another while keeping the XMR in their own custody, I believe this would violate their charter (or whatever their status is to be referred.) It’s quite complex how the site deals with funds, intentionally I imagine. This is how they comply without sacrificing The use of their product.
Product is a key word. They get a 1% fee for what they provide, which is why they need a legal entity somewhere. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to access their profits in any traditional banking system legally. I think that’s where what you’re describing could be different.
If one could create a system that could provide secure escrow, automatically. Or employ a trust model where people could work independently as escrow based on reputation. Basically separate the money from the entity organizing p2p transactions. If that were the case the entity organizing the transactions would be just an XMR craigslist, and shouldn’t need any legal charter as it’s not making any money. Especially if a decentralized hosting mechanism was employed. Similar to TOR or Crypto currency networks. Nodes verifying, updating, and broadcasting changes to a web of volunteers. Instead of a ledger of transactions or websites, it could be a ledger of advertisements, built on a few different parameters. Build a crawler for this decentralized database to filter those parameters, and you could find a suitable trade partner. The trouble then is finding a trusted party to provide escrow. Perhaps that’s as simple as the DNMs make it. You attach a Public key to identify your transaction history, the better your rep, the more you can charge and more will generally want to use you. Their would be number of challenges in moderation though. You’d need a way to prevent scammers from facilitating false trades to effect the rating system. Disputes would be the discretion of the party trusted for escrow. On top of a number of issues. If this network was successfully constructed, tested, and trusted among the community I believe it would gain a lot of the traction LM has. But that is a very big task, it would require a lot of knowledge, and strong community support. If it could be done it would be amazing. Until then LM is the best option for this type of market.

1 Like

If escrow market instances on clearnet, tor, and i2p discover each other through DHT, escrow market managers can be paid escrow fees, and escrow arbitrators can be paid escrow fees. It would be really difficult to extort money from instances on tor and i2p, and there would be little incentive to crack down small clearnet instances if the clearnet instances are hosted on decentralized (blockchain) VPS systems.

Some things don’t require escrow, and they should also be hosted on escrow market instances.

If escrow market instances send search queries to all other discovered instances, they could be slowed down. I think the right balance between discoverability and scalability is to make instances send search queries to direct peers only and use DHT only for people to discover all other market instances.

Perhaps, it’s okay to search direct peers and peers of direct peers.

Since fixed DHT seeds can be cracked down, instances should manually add escrow market instances listed on source code repository or instances discovered through DHT by the listed instances as peers.

Instance managers can find other instances on the internet, too. A keyboard escrow market can be a direct peer for other keyboard escrow markets because they know each other already.