Summary
- Casey Rodarmor has an idea for an insanely difficult project.
- He envisions an open-source darknet market with lightning network payments.
The talented Bitcoin developer, creator of Ordinals and Bitcoin Runes Protocol just had an extremely interesting idea.
On August 4, he shared a post via his X account, featuring an idea for an insanely difficult project – he’s talking about an open-source darknet market with Lightning Network payments.
According to him, the UX of existing markets is insanely bad, but “in pretty much fixable ways.” He noted that they have insane captchas, passwords, pins, and backup password requirements.
More than that, the private messages between buyers and sellers must be encrypted and decrypted out-of-browser using PGP, and payments are usually made via on-chain Monero payments.
He noted that this can be solved by creating dedicated client and backend apps that feature the following:
- Communicating over Tor
- Being able to hold keys
- Authenticating in both directions using actual cryptography instead of passwords
- Encrypting and decrypting private messages without uploading/downloading ciphertext manually
- Sending and receiving using Lightning
Rodarmor believes that a project could be produced with a 10 times better UX.
Lightning Network Is Under-Explored
He said that Lightning is under-explored as a privacy technology. Sending privacy is good according to him, but the recipient privacy is not that great.
However, recipients can easily make a self-payment to regain privacy.
Rodarmor said that if he were not working on another insanely difficult project, this is the one that he would choose.
He also said that darknet markets come and go constantly, so there are entrants all the time who would be receptive towards adopting new software, as opposed to “a bunch of incumbents with little churn” who are biased towards not changing anything or adopting new tech.
He also posted that maybe there’s no need for a dedicated client, and you could simply write a Tor browser plugin that could hold private keys and encrypt/decrypt DMs, and authenticate. Adding LN payments, you’d get 90% of the benefit of a dedicated client with less work.
Lightning is a decentralized network using smart contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant payments across a network of participants.