With localmonero shutting down, what would be the challenges of creating a federated version of localmonero? Traders and buyers can have accounts at different servers but still be able to trade each other and see each others’ listings.
The pros i can see are: It would be harder to stop without a single point of failure, and brave server maintainers can host their services in different jurisdictions to prevent legal troubles. And it would be very difficult to prosecute server admins, as they aren’t the creator but merely hosting a site.
Since you’re not asking about Haveno, the key question is, what are you trying to federate and what do you mean by localmonero?
This is what I liked about localmonero: (1) It had an easy to use web site – this can be federated over onion; (2) it had many options (especially necessary if you’re not using USD or EUR) – federation reduces liquidity per mistance; (3) It had a reputation system for sellers – this is hard to federate; (4) The arbiters have been proven over time to be trustworthy – this may be impossible to federate without a reputation system.
So, IMO, your first task is to come up with a federated trust system for both arbiters and sellers. Once you have that, listings and trading can happen on any platform, even lemmy or nostr or Simplex or Haveno or something like robosats.
In my simpleminded approach, a wallet public key could have multiple reputations associated with it (e.g. seller, buyer, arbiter). There would have to be a way to confirm that sellers actually “sold” and “buyers” actually bought and arbiters actually arbitrated…I’m sure this could be done in a hidden ZK way by adding transaction IDs to the reputation . Could this be abused since a person can create multiple wallets and trade with himself? Sure, but that could also be done in localmonero and it did fall apart.
Isn’t there also a blockchain on which files and websites can be hosted? ipfs or something?
The site(s) should operate like Nodes in a peer to peer network over TOR, where it is impossible to trace it back. We need strong enough technology where bravery is not required, the same way that Monero has been designed, for a hostile environment.
Haveno is close to what you’re describing, it doesnt have federation yet, but it’s discussed here https://github.com/haveno-dex/haveno/issues/901
Is there a p2p web browser like bittorent with privacy? No? Then why look for half measures use monero and haveno? Be your own bank also means be your own server.
