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

I believe that OpenBazaar's initial motive was to distance itself from DarkMarkets as the opportunity to directly link people worldwide for trade without intermediaries, or barriers of entry to the market outweight the needs of those looking to trade anonymously.

I foresee market forces killing off the sellers that prefer to remain anonymous and misterious unless they're selling special items.

In practice I believe people will be less scared to transact with someone who has an identity, who can be accountable. Honor and trust are necessary for all kinds of commerce.

If it were up to me, I'd build OpenBazaar to work flawlessly on the OpenInternet, if anybody needs to use the technology in a different way the code is open and I'm sure they'll find a way to try to hide themselves, but I think it's a fool's errand, no amount of Tor will hide you from the authorities if they want to get you.

I think the size of illegal markets as big as they can be are minuscule compared to the new era of trade I envision, never in our history we have been able to directly trade with anybody else out there. Centralized ecommerce outfits like ebay and amazon have only given us a glimpse of what's possible, but as good as they are, they can't scale to 100% of the planet, I believe a great p2p solution can do this and the consequences of this will be of historic importance.

This slide stack will give you the bigger picture OpenBazaar should be going after http://www.slideshare.net/yiibu/the-emerging-global-web

Worrying ourselves with pleasing users that want to be on Tor, at this point in time, I believe is a waste of time that draws the wrong kind of attention to the project. There's a much bigger opportunity to be seized, a truly world changing one.

I might not know the full name and address of the store clerk, but his employer certainly does. That clerk is representing his business and should be held accountable to business for anything he does. If I have I bad experience purchasing from that store, it doesn't matter to me that it was a bad clerk - it's Local Towel Sales, Inc. that's not going to get my business in the future.

I also as a customer don't need to know that "Sally Smith" owns the corner store, but the owner of the lot that she's renting out for her storefront certainly does. If she's running her business in such a way that it affects the value of the property or will result in legal action, she needs to be held accountable to someone.

It works exactly the same online. When I buy a product that Online Towel Sales, Inc. posted to eBay, I don't care about who posted the product online or packed it up and shipped it, I only care that it came from Online Towel Sales, Inc. and will choose whether or not to do business again with them based on that experience. Likewise, if the owner of Online Towel Sales is using eBay to peddle illegal counterfeit towels or something, eBay needs to know who to hold accountable because they have a vested interest in not having their website associated with illegal activity. I'm not going to come back to eBay if it gets a reputation for being a criminal safehaven.

My bad

Well, the conversation has apparently gone from asking why someone needs total anonymity when conducting completely legal activity online to protecting oneself from signals intelligence agencies. I have a vested interest in protecting my sensitive information online from identity thieves, scammers, people who would want to rob or injure me and people making arguments like the one I responded to who would likely use my information to embarrass me in an attempt to make a point about having "nothing to hide." When I have a credible reason to add the cops or the NSA to the list, I'll start taking measures to hide my perfectly legal activity from them as well.

The reason I don't fear them isn't because I believe they're infallible, free from abuse, etc. - the reason is that I'm significantly more likely to be assaulted by one of the hundreds of people that walk past me on the way to work than targeted by a rogue NSA agent trying to collect my online activity, and yet I can still walk down the street without being scared of everyone around me.

In the mean time, I know that if the NSA or FBI wants to target me they need a court order, and if I'm going to be arrested and tried in court the cops need evidence of illegal activity to convict me. When I see credible evidence that this is not the case, I'll take steps to protect myself from them. Despite more than a year of Snowden revelations, however, Greenwald and friends have yet to show evidence of a single American being thrown in jail because of the vast, Orwellian surveillance state that has supposedly developed around us.

If it was happening, that would have been the first thing they reported a year ago. The fact that they have yet to come up with anything tells me that in that giant trove of the NSA's deepest secrets, there is nothing to indicate any harassing or incarceration of regular citizens.