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OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

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Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#61

Post by ertdfgcb »

wyager wrote: post #51
rayiner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is protecting you from yourself. They're trying to protect other people from the damage you can do as an addict, a child pornographer, or a terrorist.

>Nobody is protecting you from yourself. They're trying to protect other people from the damage you can do as an addict, a child pornographer, or a terrorist. This is patently false. Counter-examples include A) non-addictive, very safe drugs are also illegal B) NYC tried to outlaw large sodas C) unpasteurized milk is illegal.

Just because you can pull out three (or any number) examples of shitty laws doesn't mean he's wrong.

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#62

Post by geographomics »

Jukelox wrote: post #11
geographomics wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advantage of the Silk Road style markets was that, being centralised, they could choose to filter their wares down to a particular niche. By permitting everything by design, OpenBazaar is probably going to become infamous for facilitating trade in child pornography, materials of terrorism, and other such items considered a great deal more disreputable than prohibited drugs.

I think your fears are purely speculative and are distracting from what's really going on here. We are witnessing a demand for unregulated markets because regulated markets are way too slow in responding to social changes. Let's face it - governmental decisions are made in the best interest of influential parties, not in the best interests of the individual. Do not protect me from myself.

I don't agree that regulated markets aren't sufficiently adaptive to social change. Silk Road was also a regulated market, just one that dealt in mostly illegal narcotics - so this clearly was adapting to the liberalisation of drug laws that is desired by so many.

But if Silk Road had also dealt in child pornography, for example, we can be pretty sure that most people would know about it as a haven for paedophiles, rather than an online drugs den.

My point is that purportedly neutral technologies become best known for their predominant use case. The Internet is mostly synonymous the web and email, as these were its first killer applications. Bittorrent is notorious for copyright infringement, as that is what it is overwhelmingly used for. Bitcoin has connotations of being a get rich quick scheme crossed with illegal drugs currency. And so on.

Despite its intentions of neutrality, as an anonymised, unregulated, decentralised market, OpenBazaar will most probably become known for facilitating illegal trades - of all types.

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#63

Post by krapp »

jasode wrote: post #40
krapp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can a more open platform for sellers without the stigma of illegal activity be realized? Probably not. Cars weren't invented to make bank robberies more difficult to stop. These networks were invented, to a degree which shouldn't be dismissed when considering their acceptance by the mainstream, to make enforcing laws against trading in anything more difficult, if not impossible. I think most people (not most people…

> , I also think it would be disingenuous to state that their use in illegal activities is somehow orthogonal to their purpose. The Haber Process[1] was a new way to manufacture ammonia in large quantities. Fritz Haber was originally motivated by Germany's war objectives to kill people via poison gas and explosives. Germany needed a lot of synthetic ammonia to do that. Now, the Haber process is mass producing fertili…

>It's possible to divorce the original evil uses of the technology from the later good ones.

Yes, but I would argue that doing so in this case means undermining the entire purpose of an anonymous, decentralized marketplace.

The first question most people are going to want an answer to when presented with something like OpenBazaar is "what are you going to do about the pedophiles, gun-runners, drug dealers, etc?"

If the free market's response to this is "nothing, so long as the customer gets what they paid for, everything is cool," then for most people accepting this equivalence will be a non-starter.

I think the only ways to avoid this problem are 1) hoping for a widespread shift in the way most people view the value of the force of law on commerce, 2) breaking the system enough so mainstream users are convinced of its legal integrity, or 3) pretending it's not an issue and redefining the terms by which it's sold to the public. And i'm not entirely certain the latter can scale.

I won't say it's impossible though.

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#64

Post by jasode »

dklsf wrote: post #59
jasode wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> , I also think it would be disingenuous to state that their use in illegal activities is somehow orthogonal to their purpose. The Haber Process[1] was a new way to manufacture ammonia in large quantities. Fritz Haber was originally motivated by Germany's war objectives to kill people via poison gas and explosives. Germany needed a lot of synthetic ammonia to do that. Now, the Haber process is mass producing fertili…

The motivation for development was actually producing fertilizer, as it says in the article you linked.

Yes, my memory was not accurate and I should have specified Haber-Bosch Process & Carl Bosch[1] instead of Haber Process & Fritz Haber.

Apparently, Carl Bosch's refinements to the original Haber Process had the priority goal of ramping up Germany's war munitions instead of feeding the world.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Bosch

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#65

Post by anon4 »

Touche wrote: post #25
jasode wrote: post #17

I see several comments questioning the legitimate value of a peer-to-peer marketplace. Some cannot see any use other than illegal commerce (drugs, porn, etc). It is true that such illicit trades will take advantage of that network but is it really impossible to envision legal business as the major activity? Yes, cars can be used as getaway vehicles from bank robberies and also smash terrorist bombs into government bu…

Why does a distributed marketplace intended for legal trade need to run on Tor? Do you need anonymity if you're selling towels?

Well no, but if I'm doing nothing wrong, then you have no need to see it.

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#66

Post by martinrd »

dionyziz wrote: post #35
Touche wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a distributed marketplace intended for legal trade need to run on Tor? Do you need anonymity if you're selling towels?

OpenBazaar developer here. This is the "nothing to hide" argument that we've seen used to much by the NSA and governments. The answer is that we believe people simply have the right to privacy in trade. Here's a discussion by the OpenBazaar team on the matter: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/issues/189 Do you want your credit card company to know exactly where you've shopped for the past two years? Would you…

Thank you for your work on OpenBazaar, and for your comment here.

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#67

Post by mike_hearn »

SamPatt wrote: post #24

Hey HN, this is Sam Patterson, operations lead on OpenBazaar. Please note that this open source project is about 6 months old, and not production ready. It has just started integrating Tor, but should not be considered private or secure yet. We welcome testers, we are about to release 0.3.0 sometime in the next few days. Our Github is here: https://github.com/openbazaar/openbazaar We've gotten a lot of attention from…

I think you should reconsider integration of Tor. This is quite likely to end badly for you. If the police reports are true SR2 had 150,000 users: if even a fraction of those decide to migrate to OpenBazaar at some point, any legitimate usage will likely be overwhelmed by illegal usage. That would put you in the unenviable position of being the next DPR, except not anonymous (Silk Road sold books as well as drugs but that didn't matter).

Your best bet is to just not ensure IP addresses are recorded and unobfuscated. That'll help tip the balance towards legal activity.

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#68

Post by Jukelox »

geographomics wrote: post #62
Jukelox wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your fears are purely speculative and are distracting from what's really going on here. We are witnessing a demand for unregulated markets because regulated markets are way too slow in responding to social changes. Let's face it - governmental decisions are made in the best interest of influential parties, not in the best interests of the individual. Do not protect me from myself.

I don't agree that regulated markets aren't sufficiently adaptive to social change. Silk Road was also a regulated market, just one that dealt in mostly illegal narcotics - so this clearly was adapting to the liberalisation of drug laws that is desired by so many. But if Silk Road had also dealt in child pornography, for example, we can be pretty sure that most people would know about it as a haven for paedophiles, r…

I read your argument in two parts - one that appeals to my own emotions and one that hides behind the law to demonize illegal trade.

Let's ignore the emotional part because that is highly subjective.

I'd argue that the current legislation is not effective in representing the best interests of the general public, which is what I understand the spirit of all laws to be. It takes too long to change, and for change to even be considered it takes a significant amount of money or collective effort which is not always practical.

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#69

Post by pearjuice »

jasode wrote: post #17

I see several comments questioning the legitimate value of a peer-to-peer marketplace. Some cannot see any use other than illegal commerce (drugs, porn, etc). It is true that such illicit trades will take advantage of that network but is it really impossible to envision legal business as the major activity? Yes, cars can be used as getaway vehicles from bank robberies and also smash terrorist bombs into government bu…

Google searches aren't valid citations.

Re: OpenBazaar is a decentralized Dark Net market that's 'untouchable' by police

#70

Post by gwern »

ertdfgcb wrote: post #58
gwern wrote: post #50

Keep in mind, a lot of people are hyping OpenBazaar more than it deserves or is helpful. The basic question about OB no one has answered is: assuming they get it up and running and with a good security model, why will the mass of black-market - or legal - users ever use it, when using Amazon or something is easier and more familiar? You may say that they'll use it so they don't have to worry about police, except blac…

The users that don't care are almost always the users buying the smallest (personal) amounts, and they usually don't care because they know if they get scammed or it gets lost they only lost $30. The customers who want larger quantities very much do care, and they're the ones who spend real cash. Furthermore it's pretty common for a dealer who has a good enough reputation to start requiring early finalization. Most o…

> The users that don't care are almost always the users buying the smallest (personal) amounts, and they usually don't care because they know if they get scammed or it gets lost they only lost $30. The customers who want larger quantities very much do care, and they're the ones who spend real cash.

No, you're just wrong. The multisig markets do little business, period. And lots of SR2 sales were for quite large amounts, see Judith Aldridge's paper on this topic - the larger quantities made up most of the revenue.

> I suspect the selling point will be more like: "Hackers and corrupt admins won't be able to steal your money! Plus it's never down! Plus it's harder to get arrested!".

And yet, none of that has made PGP or multisig standard.

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