Goal:
Provide a service comparable to Kijiji and Fiverr but with all prices being in Lumens
Note: The website itself will not be handling or processing payments, just connecting users.
Features:
Material Design inspired UI
SSL
Email server to facilitate communications between buyer and seller
Rating system for buyer and sellers
Item condition rating
Q&A – Can submit a question for an item or service and if the seller responds it will show up in the post to inform other buyers that might have the same question
No ads or monetization – As long as the cost of running the servers remains close to the original deployment cost I have no issues with paying for it if I can afford to
No social media plugins
Limitations:
Initially there will only be locations within USA and Canada because it takes time to add others and I am not familiar with their geography. Expanding locations will be a high priority.
Concerns:
Safety is number one. I will create a section on the site explaining how to create an transaction with a time bounds and sign it offline. The purpose is to avoid unlocking your wallet in front of a stranger and the time bounds creates an expiration date/time for the transaction. I was thinking of recommending tools such as https://www.stellar.org/laboratory/ for building and signing the transaction and another site for submitting it. Eventually I would like to create these tools myself and incorporate them into the site. Probably not the transaction signer because I do not want people inputting their private keys. If these tools do get incorporated into the site they will be open source so as many critical eyes are on it as possible.
I will also be advising not to have payments to or from a wallet with a significant amount of value since all transaction recipients and amounts are public.
Future Wish-list (ordered by descending priority):
Add more countries
Wallet Watcher – The functionality to input a wallet address and see past and pending transactions without signing into your Lumen Bazaar account.
Dynamic pricing based on fiat set amount: The ability to post an Item/Service for $100USD and say every 3-4 hour interval the XLM price gets updated to reflect the fiat exchange rate.
Transaction builder and submitter
Any interest in seeing other cryptocurrencies supported so you can filter by currency accepted?
Coin Wash – I have been toying around with the idea. I have come up with some concepts but havnt had the time to implement them on the TestNet and see how hard it would be to track a seller if the amount of the transaction was known. It will be open source.
Disclaimer:
I am not a professional web or software developer. My previous line of work had significant overlap with IT and software developement, I have created a website with a REST API to connect to their production servers and setup a forum for a company but that was on their internal network, not exposed to the internet. This is a learning experience for me especially the administration side. I am starting here with the intent to get better so I can confidently approach projects such as the Coin Wash if it is feasible. Any advice and criticism is appreciated, it will be the quickest way for me to get better.
I will be making portions of the code open to code review because I think it is important to make sure that the security functions are implemented properly. The following items will be available for review:
User registration, login and logout
CSRF token usage
Let me know if there is something else that should be reviewed for security reasons.
Feedback:
Let me know what you think. I want to see this thrive and to provide an use for Stellar. If you have any questions, concerns, criticism or advice I would like to hear it.
