B2B as unmarketplace

Unrealized promise

At the onset of B2B marketplaces, Gartner Group anticipated B2B commerce to grow to $7.3 trillion by 2004. Why it did not happen? To be precise, Ariba is selling $0.5B worth of B2B services yearly, but why is it not at least 100 times higher?

The answer is quite simple. In most industries in which marketplaces succeeded, they brought both positive and very negative effects to the market. They decreased fragmentation, increased visibility, facilitated transaction completion. But they also created a new entity, a new player, a gorilla that dictates everyone their rules and often steels relationships with the end users.

##Un-marketplace Blockchain is removing this centralization threat and thus opens the possibility for B2B and B2C commerce to occur directly between market participants, while offering a lot higher variety for transaction completion schemes, like third-party vendor, equipment and product attestation, inspections, arbitration, escrow and more. Sourcing of product, services and inventories will be logically centralized on-chain while offers around them completely decentralized by various logistics and deal facilitating providers, also on-chain.

#Public and private chains In the article on Enterprise we argued for the use of private chains behind the firewalls. Once we understand the use cases of public and private chains, it becomes easier to see how they may work together, creating a new security-first homogeneous foundation for new applications. With a private chain you could better tie an internal business process with an external B2B and B2C workflow. Today companies like wallets, merchant processors and exchanges resort to off-chain centralized operations, while in fact they could be running them on private chains. This would make them a lot more resilient in the face of non-stop hacker attacks.

In supply chains for example, a company could cryptographically tie on-public-chain orders with on-private-chain manufacturing, inner workflow, etc. and then back to on-public-chain invoice and payment. One niche example of this cryptographic tying of the off-chain processes to the on-chain is in old Timo's paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.3257 and a talk for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwyALGlG33Q Jorge (core bitcoin dev and Blockstream co-founder) claims says it motivated their first small code release: https://github.com/Blockstream/contracthashtool

Other work on decentralized markets

Open bazaar is creating a new market.

Great variety of products and product-specific price negotiation and logistics workflow make data semantics a complex topic in marketplaces. Open Bazaar addressed a subset of cases with product listings, escrow-based contracts and participant roles, like buyer, seller, notary and arbiter. If I understand it correctly Ricardian contracts bake the identity and product inventory into the workflow. When products will need more attributes and complex classifications, when one type of escrow is not enough, when notary and arbiter roles are not enough, when identities start changing, this simple scheme will need to evolve.

How Tradle looks at this problem space? Via a declarative object type system that grows from the bottom up to achieve mutual understanding between the participants.