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Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

openbazaar.org

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Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#121

Post by tylersmith »

hughw wrote: post #63
jstanley wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An added bonus is that once the software is written, it can continue to work without the involvement of OB1, even if they run out of money and disappear, and even if they turn rogue and start trying to extract fees from every transaction. It's an open source, decentralised, peer-to-peer system. As long as the peers want to keep using it, they can keep using it.

Who's going to maintain the software? Open source projects abandoned by founding companies don't have a stellar track record.

Most of us were working on OB for free before OB1. If OB1 were to fail I think many of us would continue to work on OB either at another OB-based company or just back on our own.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#122

Post by SamPatt »

contingencies wrote: post #25
Xeoncross wrote: post #11

Nothing is free, so here are my brief ideas for funding this: - Ads - "premium features" for sellers - "promoted" sellers - Fees for those that want to be "Secure Escrow and Dispute Resolution" accounts

According to https://www.openbazaar.org/about/ They founded a company, OB1, with a $1 million venture capital investment from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. [...] OB1 received a second round of investment for $3 million in the fall of 2016. OK, so just to clarify, this is a for-profit project produced by a central party with no stated plan for monetization. That is IMHO dubious. Their website http://o…

OpenBazaar itself is not a for-profit project, and it predates the formation of the OB1 company by a year.

OB1 has a plan for monetization (I'm a co-founder!) but OpenBazaar itself is designed as a neutral trade protocol and network that doesn't rely on OB1 at all, other than the majority of developer power is provided by the company at the moment.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#124

Post by contingencies »

tylersmith wrote: post #119
contingencies wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to https://www.openbazaar.org/about/ They founded a company, OB1, with a $1 million venture capital investment from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. [...] OB1 received a second round of investment for $3 million in the fall of 2016. OK, so just to clarify, this is a for-profit project produced by a central party with no stated plan for monetization. That is IMHO dubious. Their website http://o…

OpenBazaar is non-profit project built by multiple for-profit groups. Us at OB1 are just one group. https://duosear.ch and https://mubiz.com are two others.

https://duosear.ch = another search engine, no about page, domain registered to an individual, just over 1 year old.

https://mubiz.com = another search engine, very small French company

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#125

Post by SamPatt »

SpeakMouthWords wrote: post #3

How does the unit economics work here? To my understanding, BTC (even after SegWit) has non-negligible transaction fees. Is this site just eating into VC money to make things feeless?

OpenBazaar is not a site at all. People run it on the machine locally and are connected to others in a p2p network. No middleman involved, no fees paid (except BTC network fees on transactions).

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#126

Post by SamPatt »

icebraining wrote: post #18
optimalsolver wrote: post #13

What's the point if it doesn't support Tor or some other anonymizing service?

It seems it does, as of this year: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go/pull/342

The current version actually doesn't, but the 2.0 version launching soon does work with Tor.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#128

Post by sillysaurus3 »

SamPatt wrote: post #114

I work on OpenBazaar and I'm happy to answer questions. This website links to the current version of OpenBazaar, but we're just about to launch a completely new version, which you can read about here: https://medium.com/openbazaarproject/openbazaar-2-0-p2p-trad... The 2.0 is built with Go and uses IPFS. It's open source and we welcome any developers into the project: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go

Since you have merged PRs allowing use via Tor, you seem to be tacitly encouraging Open Bazaar to be used by those who want to hide their identity. In the wake of the recent darknet market closures, people have been saying that the drug trade might move to decentralized markets like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14828864

As facilitators of this technology, do you have an opinion on how it should be used? Are you concerned that the primary use case might be to acquire drugs? And are there any controls in place to encourage or discourage certain types of items from being bought and sold on this platform, or is it a complete free-for-all?

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#129

Post by bubblethink »

tylersmith wrote: post #117
symlinkk wrote: post #2

It's not anonymous at all right now. I believe they're working on Tor support for the future however.

Our next major version has Tor support.

What does TOR add to this ? I would assume that all traffic between peers is encrypted, right ? Also, for physical goods, you anyway need an address. IP anonymity can be useful for digital goods and a layer of plausible deniability I guess.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#130

Post by orf »

SamPatt wrote: post #114

I work on OpenBazaar and I'm happy to answer questions. This website links to the current version of OpenBazaar, but we're just about to launch a completely new version, which you can read about here: https://medium.com/openbazaarproject/openbazaar-2-0-p2p-trad... The 2.0 is built with Go and uses IPFS. It's open source and we welcome any developers into the project: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go

This looks incredibly interesting, thank you! I have one question: how do you handle updates using IPFS? Say a seller updates the price of item X, then a user places an order while the seller is offline based on the older price (which is presumably cached in IPFS still)?
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