I've come to a conclusion. : EmpireMarket | Torhoo darknet markets
Fucked on ketamine i'm always coming to ridiculous revelations. 'Ketelations' i call them. They can happen in a moment and as they unravel themselves it all starts to make so much sense. However, as soon as I feel a grasp on that life changing thing or act that could impact so positively on my life in so many ways it just dissapears. It trails off into whatever film i'm watching. I fall out of the hole to a signature Guy Ritchie cut and im sat there helpless clutching at straws. Things seemed so clear only moments before but now are lost.
I digress, I'm watching monsters inc and had a 'ketelation' while i was watching the scene when they're holding onto doors as they fly through the factory on rails. It made me think of autonomy. We need to turn our back on markets which use escrow wallets to hold our funds. It's not a question of if its a question of when they are going to exit scam. Taking the wallets away from the market owners removes the ability to steal funds and the admins can be compensated in various other methods decided through pre determined code. Basically what i am saying is don't flock to Icarus market, it is the same as Alphabay and Empire both of which exit scammed, as will Icarus and every other escrow based market.
Vote with your feet, don't allow a few individuals to even possess the capability to take a huge amount of everyones cash thats why btc was invented in the first place.
Hopefully this made some sense
BM
You're right but there *aren't any* trustless markets. It's the future but it will take someone skilled and without greed. Distributed, open source, multisig only, with reputation based random arbiters rewarded from vendor fees. Zero knowledge transactions.
Imagine openbazaar + Hansa + i2p + zcash, simplified as much as possible and community run.
But monero wins over zcash because of first-mover advantage, politics and being more user friendly. Zcash has some academically advanced techniques (zero-knowledge proofs) that have been forcing the entire field of cryptography forward. They consistently release very high end research. Indeed they have even caused monero to abandon RingCT in favor of Bulletproofs which is inspired by zcash's work.
the crux of it is that in an academic or theoretical sense the privacy guarantees of zcash are stronger than those of monero, and the approach more elegant. And this technology can be applied beyond financial privacy to include total privacy for the orders and disputes themselves. So if one was to design the perfect system I would use zcash's technology and neither of the currencies.