This weekend our 2 lead developers spent 28 hours hacking away to bring home the silver at the Miami Bitcoin Hackathon organized by BitStop and Blockchain Beach.
FrostWire’s project was built using the frostwire-jlibtorrent library and the Bitpay API to create a proof of concept for a p2p shopping marketplace called Seller.Trade on which customers pay with bitcoins.
End users just need a Bitcoin wallet to pay and web browser to search for products available, and sellers run a server side p2p app that connects to other sellers that participate in the network using the BitTorrent Mainline DHT. Nodes help route searches and products announced.
We intend to create a binary release for Linux servers in the coming weeks and see where this experiment takes us.
The project is very simple and it allows anyone in the planet to start their own store on line and accept Bitcoin payments, with the twist, that all the stores are connected to each other using a combination of the Mainline DHT we use for decentralized torrent tracking and an HTTP Rest API.
Check out our presentation to the judges (We finished early and made a video to not leave the presentation to improvisation and Murphy’s whims, and also so the world could see it anytime later on)
And here’s us accepting the prize (In bitcoins of course)
and now it will be in front of our desk to make us proud 🙂
question… since you’re still reading all the way down here.
Would you like to see FrostWire yield search results of products that you could buy with Bitcoin?
Would you like to sell things using your own store server without paying any listing or comission fees?
Should we make Seller.Trade into a real world product?
Yes, definitely and yes!
Hasn’t the OpenBazaar team been working on something like this for a while? You guys should team up!
Yes, I’m one of the members of the OpenBazaar team, I thought I’d try a simpler and more to the point approach of simply selling things (without contracts and arbiters), meant to get people selling as soon as possible.