[SamPatt]

Buyers can place orders one of two ways:

1. A direct order. The Bitcoin goes directly from buyer to vendor. There are no protections. This method is only used for small value transactions or transactions where the buyer trusts the vendor.

2. A moderated order. The Bitcoin goes into an escrow account (a 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig address) and there is a third party moderator who will resolve a dispute if one of the parties feels wronged.

Note that if there is no dispute opened in a moderated order, the buyer and the seller can release the funds without the moderator even knowing they were chosen for an order.

There's nothing to prevent listing flooding, but the rest of the network will just ignore nodes that are abusive. There are also third party search engines that crawl the network, and they'll block spam themselves for their users. Rawflood is an example:

https://rawflood.com

[teddyh]

How do you select and assign moderators?

[SamPatt]

Currently the vendor selects a list of moderators they are comfortable working with, and then at the time of a sale the buyer selects the one they prefer. If a dispute is opened the moderator the buyer picked from the vendor's list will resolve the dispute.

[teddyh]

That does not sound safe for the buyer at all; they’re forced to choose a moderator from a list completely decided by the vendor?

[SamPatt]

In practice most vendors choose from the top moderators on the platform who all have good reputations, so it's not as dangerous as it sounds.

If a vendor only offers unknown moderators a buyer just won't buy from them, or will ask them to add a moderator they trust.

[smogcutter]

What's in it for the moderator? I assume they get a cut of the escrow?

How is the moderator's reputation visible to a buyer? If there's some kind of rating system, why would the reviews be useful at all? After all, any situation where the moderator has to act will leave one party pissed off.

This seems like a lot of complication just to buy something on the internet... unless what you're buying is heroin. In which case the whole 100% p2p thing starts making more sense.

[teddyh]

But how do moderators become moderators in the first place? How do I, as a prospective buyer, know that all the moderators aren’t all pre-chosen by big sellers (by fair means or foul) to be sympathetic to them?

Regarding “reputations”: Remember Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”