Towards Communal Governed Transactions Among Decentralized Trading Agents

We present a concept in completing transaction among collaborative agents where neither trusted authority nor intermediate facilitator exists. Agents collectively intend and accept that there are valuable objects to be used as medium of exchange. This object, which we call an institutional-token, belongs to an agent through collective acceptance of ownership relation which binds that object to the agent. Transaction between buyer and seller is completed as follows: buyer and seller propose new ownership of the token to all agents, the agents collectively reject prior ownership which binds the token to the buyer and at the same time collectively accept the new ownership relation which binds the same token to the seller in order to "transfer" token to the new owner. Buyer rates the outcome of the transaction and updates its opinion about trustworthiness of the seller. Based on its opinion, agent participates in every collective trust decision whether or not the proposed transaction may proceed. This collaboration scheme enables community to govern transactions in individual level and thus social control emerges to block possible bad behavior, to protect buyer from risky transactions, and to induce good behavior. Finally we describe an implementation scenario in a decentralized P2P file trading community using set of communication protocols and threshold cryptography