> Uniquely, every user has their own heavily subjective view of the marketplace. One component of this is relay selection. The other component is past user actions used to build a network of minimally trusted Nostr public keys, known as the Web of Trust (WoT).

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SatShoot - Freelancing for a Real Market

Online marketplaces today suffer from the problem of "platform capture" caused by high time-preference short-term thinking: settlement shackled by fiat money and user identities locked in walled gardens. In another article I already pointed out that it is a fool's errand to create a fake "global" view of the market, and that the solution for building lasting marketplaces lies in open protocols. Specifically, I am betting on Bitcoin (and Bitcoin-based medium-of-exchange protocols) and Nostr. Unstoppable money and identity enable unstoppable individuals forming real marketplaces.

This article is about an instance of this: SatShoot is a freelance app built for the Freedom Economy. As we will see the design principles of an application built on freedom tech are radically different from apps following the platform-model. It is more similar to the Unix philosophy of building good software: "Do one thing well, keep it simple and strive for compatibility".

Platforms = Walled Gardens

In contrast to open paradigms, legacy platforms create their own proprietary data formats. Identity and user-data live exclusively on servers controlled by the platform-operator. When their servers go down, everything is down. When they go out of business, the precious data describing connections and reputation is lost. They can change their terms at will, exclude entire countries, or make the platform uneconomical for certain groups. They face minimal repercussions—while discontent users must start over elsewhere, incurring a heavy toll.

Another well-known consequence of platforms is rigidity. Even if someone has a great idea to extend the marketplace, they must ask the operator for access to the data. Thus they become completely dependent on the platform API that gets breaking changes every now and then, and that is often a deliberate decision to restrict third-party services and integrations with other platforms they don't like. History is filled with such cases, from eBay, Amazon, Etsy and Craigslist to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Basically every major Big Tech platform has been involved in multiple such scandals, and the rugpulls will continue. Why? Because platforms do not have a strong incentive to co-operate when users don't have an easy way to replace them.

As soon as they lock you in, you are essentially building up an unverifiable track record on the servers of some company that you cannot hold accountable in practice. Worse still, the platform operator has less and less incentive to serve the actual market participants once they build up some network effect. This process is called 'Enshittification'. A once-useful platform becomes a prison for its users, as the operator shifts focus to ad revenue and monopolistic control. To control what people see (ads) and how they act (predatory business models and captured data), they must become the absolute authority, the global middleman of the market.

For example, LinkedIn gates access using "InMail credits" and premium subscriptions. Fiverr forbids exchanging any external means of contact, controls discovery with "Promoted Gigs" and takes a 20% cut of each deal currently. Upwork enforces limits on how many "connections" can be made controlling proposal submissions and visibility of Freelancers. This is just to name a few of the myriad ways marketplaces are gate-kept by platform-operators.

The end result is that everyone loses—even the platform itself. As usability declines, business customers leave, and the platform loses market share.

There have been a number of attempts to create more community-driven marketplaces with less strict policies, such as Malt or Contra. These are already steps to improve the situation but still they suffer from centralization issues: - Moderation and curation are done in a centralized fashion, making it difficult to create a highly customized experience, and exposing the marketplace to regulatory capture - Data is still proprietary and unsigned - The app/website is closed source - algos and reputation are unverifiable

Caveats

This is not to say that it is easy to replace the centralized platform model. From a dispassionate view, without centralization it becomes harder—or at least less obvious—how to make money. Protecting users from scams and spam while also ensuring a decent experience is no small task. The more roles the platform assumes the more control it has over how well that marketplace operates, at least in the short-term. Often times when I discuss this matter I hear valid objections from people how bad actors can easily ruin a marketplace. It usually only takes one bad experience to lose trust in the complete system, and rightfully so.

If Freedom Tech is going to compete with platforms, concerns about usability must be addressed. Moreover, freedom-oriented alternatives to platform-based marketplaces must also deal with the issue of sustainability. It is one thing to be free and open-source but in reality people need monetary incentives to put time and effort into software development and maintenance.

I believe that these challenges are solvable, and freedom tech tools can be usable and profitable without becoming central points of capture. Building on new and better paradigms seems to be the only way to go, since fiat solutions like antitrust laws did not, and will never, work.

The alternative: Cypherpunk values

"We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down." — Eric Hughes

We aim to reflect these values in the design principles of SatShoot: - Trust-minimized - "The app is powered by Nostr, where every event is signed, from taking on a job to leaving a review, keeping users and SatShoot accountable. The code is open source, and trivial to self-host as a static web page.

• Clarity and Control

  • We believe in giving users options with crystal clear trade-offs. From relay choices, to trust settings, it's all configurable and we can never intervene

• Growth and Learning

  • SatShoot provides sane defaults and lets users evolve at their own pace to become unstoppable individuals. We do not merely respect choice but encourage users to make them consciously by helping them understand their impact

Basic (M)Architecture

Nostr: Open and Verifiable

Nostr relays facilitate the spreading of information. So we can say that a Nostr-based marketplace exists on any relay that is used as such: in SatShoot Clients can post Jobs or place Orders on Services, and Freelancers can post Bids on Jobs, or publish their Service offerings on any relay they configure in the settings. Jobs, Orders, Bids and Services are all Nostr-events, signed by their respective publishers and sent to the selected relays (there are some default relays to get users started). This has important consequences on the way the marketplace works: - Signed data cannot be denied, faked, or tampered with. Whatever market actors do, will be provable by everyone - Nostr events can be created and parsed by any other client apps implementing the open specification, so SatShoot becomes just an app that displays and helps create the data, but has no control over any other freelance app competing with SatShoot - Anyone can fork SatShoot and publish a modified app (in this case, a static website that is easy and cheap to host basically anywhere), or create an entirely new app implementing the same type of events, and the marketplace would not notice any disruption. SatShoot.com can disappear but people could just switch and keep doing business - Relays can come and go but users are most likely not affected by this because they can post to multiple relays and/or backup the signed data and republish any time - The current relay settings define the basic view of the market. Relays can be anywhere, operated by anyone who grants access to their own relays the way they want. It can be a public and fairly open relay, or one that only accepts certain people, or even for-profit relays that require payment to post. There is no absolute authority, just people acting in their own interest

You can see that "the marketplace" does not exist in SatShoot nor the relays, strictly speaking. It is distributed in an ecosystem of arbitrary participants: Nostr events are just signed data that can live on relays, cached in browser storage, saved on a backup hard drive or anywhere else: a self-authenticating piece of information tied to a digital identity controlled by its creator, ready to be used in the desired context. It says just enough to be meaningful but is not too heavily opinionated.

Trust and Reputation

This is the most important part of SatShoot. Uniquely, every user has their own heavily subjective view of the marketplace. One component of this is relay selection. The other component is past user actions used to build a network of minimally trusted Nostr public keys, known as the Web of Trust (WoT).

Web of Trust

As mentioned before, chosen relays provide the basic scope of the marketplace. To eliminate central points of failure, we have to apply decentralized moderation and reputation scoring. This needs to rely on past actions taken on Nostr. Signals of minimal Trust can draw from multiple kinds of events but SatShoot mostly relies on follow lists currently.

Kind 3 "social follows" are originally meant for subscribing to microblog (Twitter-like) content of another user. This can be used as an implicit signal of minimal trust (not a scammer). Moreover, SatShoot uses kind 30000 "freelance-follows" to help distinguish people followed in a professional context from a more general social context. However, if users were only able to interact with people they directly follow, that would restrict the view of the market too much. Liquidity as well as trust has to be considered.

Therefore, WoT is extended to include people from "second-degree follows" (all follow lists of npubs on the user's follow list) with a fairly naive algorithm that also accounts for social mutes and reports. Actions taken directly by the user matter much more than that of the follow network, of course.

WoT requires a deliberate decision to follow an npub so trust is never based on unsound metrics such as "people who follow me" because those can be easily gamed. Even so, there can be cases where users accidentally follow a scammer or a bot. Unintended follows or compromised accounts can still game this system but at least the user's follow network can still mute and report which can remove a person from WoT.

Future Perspective

The WoT algorithm can change, and other event types can be added to the calculation in the future to extend sources of trust as Nostr is maturing. For example, as more and more communities form on Nostr, group member lists can serve as precious sources of trust.

Another nice feature could be to allow users to fine-tune these sources of trust dynamically in-app. A client could be a member of a reputable "Web development" group, and when he wants to get a crucial web-related Job done, he might want to only accept Bids from this group. Dynamically configurable trust-sources would also allow relaxing trust-requirements if we want to find a counterparty sooner.

Users might sometimes want to look into much more possible connections than a client-side calculated naive algorithm could: WoT services like Vertex constantly crawl many relays and can run complex algorithms like personalized pagerank to find reputable followers of a target user that is not by default in the current user's WoT. Multiple such WoT service providers could be used to vet unknown people with the use of DVMs creating a marketplace for introducing people on SatShoot and Nostr in general. This is only useful for users with a minimal following though.

Reputation

So far we have excluded people we want to avoid in the market but we still need to be able to determine the best possible counterparty for a particular deal. That is where Reputation comes into play. Reputation is based on past freelance deals which means reviews posted and payments made. Both Clients and Freelancers can receive reviews after deals are done which can be viewed by potential future counterparties, through the lens of their subjective WoT of course. Reviews and zaps outside of WoT are filtered out this way, making it hard to game the system with fake events.

Reviews are based on a scheme called "Qualitative Thumb System": Good (thumbs-up or Job was completed successfully) or Bad (thumbs-down or Job was not resolved) rating makes up half of the full score. The binary rating is further sophisticated with excellence labels in SatShoot, which together take up the other half of the score. Labels contribute to scoring as well as they serve as reputation signals on their own: one can count for example how many "expert" labels were received by a Freelancer on Jobs associated (tagged) with website development.

Bitcoin-based (Lightning and Cashu ecash) payments are aggregated on Deals as an additional signal of Reputation. We can say that if both parties in a deal are within our WoT then zaps coming from the Client on that deal are trustworthy too. Jobs and Services carry topic labels ("t" tags) to provide a basis for precise reputation in a target area. As more deals are made, more people review and zap so the network effect of cryptographically verifiable work-related reputation can build up.

QTS reflects how people rate each other in real-life situations better than five-star ratings which ultimately are heavily skewed towards 1 and 5 anyway but lack labeling. Zaps also present a novel way to build and verify reputation using signed events and Nostr pubkeys tied to rich context, rather than payments providers and platforms giving the user unverifiable data in proprietary format, using closed source code.

Trust and Reputation should be the focus of any marketplace. This is the bread and butter of SatShoot, and there will always be room for improvement but to create a disintermediated, freedom-oriented discovery layer for work is well-worth the effort in my opinion.

Monetization

It's all about time-preference

Sustainability is a core aspect of marketplaces. A radical user- and freedom-oriented marketplace must also make money to survive. This is not impossible at all in my opinion but low time-preference is necessary. Today, venture capitalists tend to deploy (at least) millions of dollars to projects that they want to see succeed in a couple of years. This time-frame with such a high risk demands from the entrepreneur to cut corners and rush to profitability very fast.

This effectively means that a walled-garden type of platform model will be chosen most likely, which is gradually enshittified as mentioned before. The alternative to this is building with the right design a super-niche minimal product that only solves real and crucial problems for a narrow target audience with much at stake, therefore is ready to listen and to endure rough edges and the pain of change.

Paths to profitability

The following methods are not new, not even in the way software makes money, it is just that fiat money-fueled business models have been dominant for a long time since money and control has been centralized into giant institutions and governments. Luckily, freedom tech tools have brought about a paradigm shift to the sustainability of businesses in the digital realm.

Value for Value

Voluntary donations seem like a far-fetched idea for sustainability, but the right incentives can work wonders in this area. In SatShoot Freelancers can pledge an arbitrary percentage of their potential future revenue to support the app. They need to configure this for every Bid or Service they publish. The pledged percentage will be displayed to Clients before they select a Freelancer for a Job or place an Order on a Service. All-time pledged amounts are displayed on all accounts conspicuously to tie pledging to reputation. Freelancers can also select "Sponsored npubs" to split the overall pledged amount between SatShoot and a chosen account.

Nothing of this is really enforced by SatShoot but it is still a cryptographically signed promise by the Freelancer, possibly affecting how they are viewed by others. If pledges are fulfilled via SatShoot, they will be verifiable to some extent, using zap receipt events. The more pledges are paid out in the app the more outside observers can be confident that the initial promise was honored.

Value-adding services

The most obvious example of this is recommendation systems for various purposes. "Top 10 Reputable Freelancers in web development" or "Clients with at least 5 successful deals in graphic design" etc. These optional services can operate similarly to WoT services just customized to freelancing.

Cashu ecash can be used for fast, cheap and private micropayments on a per-usage basis, where a minimal amount of sats-backed ecash are attached to each request. This transactional relationship with service providers avoids headaches with subscriptions or account credits.

SatShoot in the big picture

Bitcoin has shown that freedom-tech can be successful and that trust in value is better based on cryptographic verification instead of fiat promises. While Bitcoin is overhauling the financial system, we need to take the learnings and apply them to areas where freedom is still not well-served.

Platform-driven marketplaces hinder true innovation and make it hard to unlock the full potential of digital trade, just like fiat did with money. The marketplace of the future must follow the path Bitcoin took: crucial data must be signed and made available in an open protocol. Innovation in the Nostr ecosystem is indeed happening in the spirit of Bitcoin.

I would go on to say that Bitcoin very much needs an open protocol like Nostr to reach its full potential as freedom-money. The store-of-value aspect of Bitcoin is gaining plenty of momentum but money is only saved to be spent later as needed. Many bitcoiners are already spending sats on services they find valuable, and the number of people spending Bitcoin will only increase long-term, especially when talented Freelancers demand it.

I expect more and more people to jump the fiat ship and start accumulating sats as a side-hustle or even full-time. Another added benefit is the fact that encroaching KYC/AML regulations will make it prohibitively hard to acquire No-KYC bitcoin but opportunities on Nostr don't necessarily need KYC, depending on the situation of the counterparties.

SatShoot is betting on the thesis that excellent work deserves the hardest money and verifiable reputation, protected by cryptography, delivered by Nostr relays. An unstoppable job market has the potential to supercharge bitcoin adoption as a medium of exchange in my view, and at last we have the right tools to make it happen.

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