It is somewhat ironic that this paper comes from a Dutch University, since Holland has historically made a great deal of money from acting as a middle-man, as indeed it continues to do.
The paper questionably approaches the subject theoretically through a pre-digital era reference which divides trust through conventional relations of 1990s society, which is of dubious currency.
The treatment of trust in decentralized networks is high level only and in parts not of an academic quality of writing, for example making inferences that 15 years of prior formal work is valueless because it has not been publicly deployed.
I don't claim ownership of any ideas, but find the overall public advancement (or arguable lack thereof) in the cryptocurrency arena pretty interesting. My interpretation of the older paper in question is that it is some kind of hard-coded Bitcoin blockchain/sidechain centric multi-asset balance based reputation system: To keep this project realistic, the focus will be on re-using existing code, to support only Bitcoin-Multichain trading, only use a single market maker, and offer no anonymity or DDoS protection.
Frankly this sounds like a pretty toy / naive implementation of multi-asset / multi-settlement-system reasoning given the year of publication. However, it's still great to see people pushing in this direction, and I certainly don't mean to dissuade anyone.
It was hard to get past the grammar and other minor problems listed below.
* Ugly typesetting (words hanging out into the margin). Typesetting widows and orphans are not handled well. Odd capitalization is used, for example 'BlockChain'.
* A brazen claim that "Paper contracts could be replaced by Ethereum contracts." I'm an Ethereum proponent, yet I'm much more cautious about the application of smart contracts to legal contracts.
These sorts of papers would be a little easier to read if the definitions were a little tighter and the goal of the article was a little clearer. "Marketplace" & "trust" are big-ish words, for example.
I'm still not sure what the "The challenge of decentralized marketplaces" is. Securing reputation systems against spam? What's all the stuff about different market types for?
We are on track to put our blockchain-regulated decentral market live this summer: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/2559