My Criticism with P2P Economy

Just for the start, I'm on the side that like P2P economy. Yet I have my own gripe about this style of conducting business.

First, it expect us to hold our own action accountable do every research homework on our own. You gotta search for who are willing to trade with you and then you still need to make sure if the reputation of the trader is good so they won't scam you. That's a lot of mental work to do just doing a transaction.

If I must make a comparison, it's like how you want to make a bread but you gotta plant the wheat yourself first. It's economically expensive to do it alone on your own. Sure it's possible. But expecting everyone to hold the same standard is hard if not straight impossible.

The reason why every successful business can gain a lot of customer is because they're able to remove every friction that customer encounter when purchasing a product or service. Also having escrow system in place doesn't help. My friend just got scammed on Xmrbazaar by a fake mediator. He's impersonating popular figure in the Monero space to gain trust. It look legit because the scammer also has review which probably fabricated. This is why I personally don't mind for a website held custody of the funds. Especially if that website already have reputation on the net. A single point of failure in the form of a site that need to uphold their reputation is better than having many in the form of scammer and their fake account.

Everything has a drawback. This is just my own feedback on the solution but moving forward I think a hybrid system is a viable solution. A mix of custody and P2P set in place. A website or platform can hold the user funds and act as the mediator to prevent scam as the default, but the user also can choose to do p2p with independent escrow if they're not feeling safe trusting that website for whatever reason.

Scammers has always been a problem for a long time and the reason why our community being shunned upon although we offer real solution to ever growing surveillance state. P2P economy is good in nature but it forgot to take account that there are also malevolent and selfish people out there.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions