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Bitagoras

Bitagoras is a decentralized service open market. Its name came from Bitcoin and Agora (cf. Ancient Agora of Athens).

Take Alice and Bob. Say Alice is a veterinarian and Bob has a coughing fish. All Bob wants now is to get advice. But he doesn't have a close friend who happens to be a vet. He can ask his friends if they know someone, but then Bob wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable asking too many questions, and this vet might feel uncomfortable taking from Bob any reward, even if Bob will offer one. There are similar issues with posting a call for help in social networks. Not to mention if the desired service isn't so common to get from friends: say one need to consult a British lawyer, or some kind of doctor nearby.

If there only could be a way that Bob could find Alice easily, and they could conduct a video call so Bob could show his fish to Alice, and Bob could pay Alice for every second of their conversation without the significant frictions of transferring small amounts? Well if they had such a system, not only would Bob be happier, but Alice as well - she can generate income by just sitting at home and sharing her knowledge.

Bitagoras is designed to be such a system. First of all, it is fully decentralized. Just like Bitcoin. All transfers and negotiation happen between Alice and Bob only. Thanks to the Blockchain technology, micropayments are made possible, so the reciever is guaranteed to have what s/he deserves up to every second, with no friction at all.

Here's how things are going to look from the user's point of view. The client will supply:

  1. Directory. Allowing browsing and searching for professionals offering various services who are registered to the system. Professionals will offer their prices, working times, proffered services, personal details (not a must but important for many markets) and so on.

  2. Scheduling. Once Bob has found Alice in the directory, he schedules an appointment. Once Alice accepts the appoinment, Bob (automatically) deposits an initial amount of coins into a multisig address, after Alice provides him with a refund form, just in case the service is not provided. In simple words: they initiate the micropayments protocol that is going to happen between them on the time they scheduled. This initiation is fully reversible.

  3. When time comes, a video conversation is initiated. Once it begins and only then, charging begins.

For future development, I have thoughts about combinatorial auctions support.

The plan is to make the system support various Bitcoin-compatible coins, including Bitcoin of course. Just give it RPC access to your wallet, and if your wallet supports standard actions, it'll just work. Users will be able to supply multiple currencies they allow using.

In addition, Bitagoras is planned to maintain its own chain. Professionals need a place to put their profile into, so a token will be created for this purpose. It's like Namecoin: used to allocate a timed resource to be written in the global database.

A final note: This system isn't supposed to be anonymous. Typically, customers will seek people from nearby, that publish their identity.

Funding the project will be done via donations. Please donate Bitcoins to https://blockchain.info/address/12iQ6LNL7wue4C56CmpjXaiTB4ACp5GPRi in order to bring this into reality. If the system will include creation of a new token, donators will share them.

To sum it up, the vision of Bitagoras is a world of direct hiring, freedom, efficiency and fairness.

Sincerely,

Ohad Asor 3 Dec 2014