Tolbana

You are a Person, Not a Product

Our internet is broken. What was originally meant to be a global distribution of free information has now devolved to exploitation and pervision of our browsing habits so big tech companies can expunge their clients for every last fraction of value.

We at Atemosta find this current state of internet affairs to be completely unacceptable, and have decided to spend a considerable amount of effort to combat it in our own small way.

Our effort is Tolbana, a web app to buy and sell goods with local cryptocurrercy users while keeping their internet profiles private and secure.

Features

Simple UX

Tolbana will closely resemble Facebook Marketplace in terms of UX. Users will be able to upload post on items they wish to see, and a generic location of where they are willing to conduct the in-person transaction will be listed.

Privacy

The only information stored on our servers from our users will be their account id, what posts they have uploaded, and what posts they have bookmarked.

We will NEVER ask for personally identifying information (name, gender, ethnicity, age, etc.) because it is not required for conducting an simple transaction. (You have the thing or you do not, and you client has the money or they don’t. Why create compromising situations by holding onto personal information?)

We will never aggregate or bundle our user’s interactions to third-party advertisers as we at Atemosta believe that advertisments are immoral and waste two of our most precious resources in life: time (which can never be refunded) and money (which is how much time you spent working on behalf of another.)

We will not be in control of how funds are exchanged between users, but we are going to leverage cryptocurrency as the payment method for acquiring credits on our platform. Credits will be used to create posts in order to mitigate spam and low-quality posts, and can be earned for contributing to the platform or power users. Atemosta will be leveraging Bitcoin Lightning as it’s first cryptocurrency, with the primary reasons being

• Instant Transactions with Insanely Low Fees
• Obfuscation of funds source - though cryptocurrency today is amazing with its ability to conduct transactions without third-party censorship, it is trivial to trace the owner of an account which is an EXTREMELY compromising anti-feature.
  • Bitcoin Lightning is a Layer 2 solution which obfuscates where funds came from but guarentees two parties can send funds as long as the route between users exists, and can keep the anonymity and therefore privacy and safety of our users.

Security

For authentication, we are exporing Web3 Wallets as a method of logging in and interacting with the Tolbana platform. Unlike email, which is owned by a third-party entity that can lock you out of your account (not to mention the most insecure platform still in existence today), your Web3 Wallet is in your control based on the seed you have created. So long as you have your Web3 Wallet seed backed up and secured in a safe location, your account is invunerable to exploitation.

For communication, we have a longer term roadmap for creating an in-app messaging platform, but in the meantime we are going to leverage Keybase. For those who do not know how awesome Keybase is, we have a blog post detailing just that, but the short summary is that Keybase is a free encrypted messaging and file-sharing platform - think Discord but open source and insanely secure.

Preview

A demo of Tolbana is being devoloped at the time of this post. To log in, all one needs to do is connect their Web3 wallet which will serve as their account and unique identifier.

Roadmap

Coming soon, but scheduled to be released in Q2 2022.