9 ms·

Sneak Peek at Bitcoin's Upcoming Killer App – Open Bazaar

139 points by nissimk 11y ago

theseatoms 11y ago
What will prevent seller fraud? (The kind of fraud discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10857478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10857478 ) edit: The site's having trouble, but here's a link to the subreddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jerguismi 11y ago
  I guess there is multi-sig escrow built-in somehow. If not, then it is quite stupid project I guess.
  - kin 11y ago
    According to their blog, there is a multisig set up. See here: https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/ https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/
  - hoffmabc 11y ago
    You have the choice between direct payment transactions which is more risky and should only be used between known parties and then there is a 2 of 3 party multisig escrow transaction that allows a moderator to be an arbitrator for problems and funds are only released if 2 of the 3 parties agree.
  - SamPatt 11y ago
    Yes, it uses a 2-of-3 multisig escrow by default. The third party is selected on an open marketplace.
- pat2man 11y ago
  They have moderators and ratings. Moderators are a third party in a multi sig transaction. More info here: https://blog.openbazaar.org/decentralized-reputation-in-openbazaar/ https://blog.openbazaar.org/decentralized-reputation-in-open...
  - joosters 11y ago
    So as well as finding a trustworthy seller, you now have to also find a trustworthy moderator. Hasn't this just doubled the trust problem?
    - pat2man 11y ago
      You don't need to find a trustworthy seller, just a trustworthy moderator. Like buying something on Amazon. You don't trust the seller, you trust Amazon. This is similar to any real world transaction. I can buy directly from someone if I trust them, but if not we both need to agree to use the same third party to facilitate the transaction.
      - joosters 11y ago
        Saying you don't need a trustworthy seller is so obviously wrong... even proper, regulated, reliable and biased-towards-the-buyer companies like eBay and Amazon still publish seller ranks, ratings and reviews. Furthermore, they actively filter out the scammers. You are closing your eyes to the problems OB is creating itself.
        dmix 11y ago
        This problem exists in market capitalism as well. The solution to this problem is that there will always be a massive incentive not to scam people - to earn a strong reputation and userbase - by being a legitimate business person. Secondly, despite a small minority who are amoral, the vast majority of people aren't short-term thinking opportunistic scammers. The rewards of being legit can be massive and rewarding on a long-term basis. Inspiring others to follow suit. Scamming is always a short-term, high-risk low-reward act that always exists as a niche in every market. The odds will always be against these people because the opposition is better financed and incentivized to counter their schemes. Thirdly, Most consumers have a certain level of tolerance for being scammed but as long as the majority of transactions are legit then the trade-offs of reduced fees, lack of censorship, and pseudonymity will keep people using the market. Finally, if someone doesn't have the tolerance or analytical ability to not get scammed then there still exists many options outside of the market. What matters is a significant enough amount of buyers/sellers use the service. It doesn't need everyone.
- exo762 11y ago
  OpenBazaar model may be good enough or not good enough. Hard to tell. Fraud prevention may work with help of 3rd party arbiters, but 3rd party may not be 3rd party at all. And it's not even that hard to set up. Situation where seller and buyer have two distinct sets of trusted arbiters is also easy to imagine. There is a much more interesting solution for this problem. No third party needed. Two parties, game theory and one established fact about human psychology could be enough. Idea is following - if any of parties can't possibly gain anything from fraud in the long run, there will be no fraud. To achieve that, buyer freezes two prices of the item, seller freezes one price of the item. Money is frozen atomically, and is defrosted atomically. Money is freed only if both parties are happy. Some studies indicate that people have very strong feelings about justice IF they are dealing with strangers. This should cause strong revulsion of any unjust solution (e.g. buyer caving in just to unfreeze some of frozen money). To prevent such blackmail and other forms of psychological manipulation, both parties are anonymous by default and can't communicate using this software. Project is called Bitmarkets [1], it's published on MIT license and it's amazing. Read about it. [1] https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/ https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/
  - RealityVoid 11y ago
    That is great! I was just thinking that might be a viable solution to the escrow problem. Will check out bitmarkets, I think those guys are onto something. On the other Hand, OpenBazaar also has the social and rating system going for it, I'd love to eventually to see a solution fusing these two.
  - soared 11y ago
    Very interesting idea. I haven't read through your link entirely, but I'm always a bit of wary of things based on how we think humans should behave and not how we actually see them behave.
pakled_engineer 11y ago
Of course the 'money' in this is abstracting away the complexities of Open Bazaar with your own app since their example GUI is pretty confounding. For example create a designer clothing app that only lists other designer clothing listings (to not scare away customers who discover a bunch of heroin for sale on OB with the regular GUI), then sell the ranking they appear in your app, or in app ads as a small example. I don't like the Moderator rating system though, seems too easy to game and has too many worthless stages 1-5. Bitcoin-OTC ratings are more clear. The rating "This is a scam avoid at all costs" opens the door for legal issues of people trying to sue the developers like when Ebay gave up on negative feedback due to too many lawsuits. Of course there is also issues of governments trying to shut down this completely due to weapons and narcotics undoubtedly being sold on OB in the future, I assume the creators have a plan for dealing with that inevitable gov harassment. The creators/maintainers should also be careful where they travel, if they fly to say, China, Indonesia or Turkey for any reasons they could be arrested there and pushed through a kangaroo court.
- asciimo 11y ago
  Is BitTorrent, Inc. harassed in these ways?
  - pakled_engineer 11y ago
    Cohen and Navin made a deal with the MPAA to remove links to illegal content on the official BitTorrent website which opened the door for 3rd party tracker sites like the piratebay to do so. I imagine this will happen with OB the official app will be crippled by lawsuits but of course this all depends what they have told each other in private unencrypted emails and the dev mailing list. There's already a thread where Patterson advocates to recommend suggesting that developers talking about OpenBazaar with the public cite example products that are “illicit but socially acceptable" such as Fireworks and Radar Detectors. “Stuff that people wouldn’t disagree with but is technically illegal to sell because of stupid laws.” Seems nobody has learned from the Megaupload case how you can talk yourself into problems with overzealous prosecutors.
    - 11y ago
asciimo 11y ago
I have a ton of stuff in my garage patiently waiting for Open Bazaar. (That's my current excuse, anyway.)
- brighton36 11y ago
  Why not just use craigslist or ebay?
nols 11y ago
Hasn't this been upcoming for awhile now? Are they releasing soon?
officialjunk 11y ago
bitcoin itself once had a market built in that was removed by satoshi in this changelist: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995ede03fb934edd67f1359ba8 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995e...
- LukeHoersten 11y ago
  I've never seen that before. Thanks for pointing to the revision. Very cool.
  - officialjunk 11y ago
    must have been a bittersweet valentines day for satoshi too ;)
- junseth 11y ago
  Wow! That seems very Drop Zone-ish https://github.com/17Q4MX2hmktmpuUKHFuoRmS5MfB5XPbhod https://github.com/17Q4MX2hmktmpuUKHFuoRmS5MfB5XPbhod
pbreit 11y ago
Is there a nickname or law describing the pre-announcement of something being a killer app that essentially predicts its doom?
- nsns 11y ago
  app killer?
- SamPatt 11y ago
  To be fair, I'm an OpenBazaar dev and I don't think anyone on our team is calling this the killer app of Bitcoin. Of course we have great faith in it, and expect it will be a great match for Bitcoin (decentralized markets for decentralized money) but we're not claiming this is the project to end all other Bitcoin projects. It's great to see so many people excited about it though.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    I hear ya. Self-proclaimed, which I didn't really mean to imply here, would be even worse.
- philippnagel 11y ago
  A pre-killed app?
- mhuffman 11y ago
  Daikatana Syndrome?
- Cyberdog 11y ago
  "Pride comes before a fall."
SamPatt 11y ago
Hey everyone, I'm Sam and I work on the OpenBazaar project. Happy to answer questions if anyone has them. Looks like their site is down, here's a simple overview: https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/ https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/ We're getting close to launch and we'd love as many eyes on the code as possible. Here's our backend, built in Python: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server And our client: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Client https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Client If you want to try it yourself I recommend you join our Slack and ask for help. We're building installers and packages now but I'm sure most people here could handle the manual installation process if they're curious. You can invite yourself to the Slack here: https://openbazaar-slackin-drwasho.herokuapp.com/ https://openbazaar-slackin-drwasho.herokuapp.com/ Cheers!
- roymurdock 11y ago
  So if I understand correctly, OpenBazaar will be shifting costs from a central verification and fulfillment agency (Amazon, Visa, etc.) onto the buyers, sellers, and moderators of the market? Buyers will have to spend more time researching vendors and moderators, then agreeing with a vendor on a moderator which will be difficult as no moderator can be 100% impartial and the largest 5-6 (that will develop due to natural economies of scale) will develop their own brands and reputations for being easy on buyers, easy on sellers, random coin toss, etc. Where is this cost made up for the buyers - will they see lower prices? Wouldn't it be more expensive as moderators need to be compensated for their services? Also, from the pitch deck linked in the article [1] slides 48-51: What about moderator reputation? Difficult problem to solve as there will always be on party that is happy with the result, and one that is unhappy. Transparency is the best approach...Negative or positive consensus on the quality of dispute resolution will inform Vendors and Buyers How can there be a consensus on a moderator if one party is always happy and one is always unhappy? Won't the consensus always be 50/50? Also, how do you plan to scale up transparency? Is that mostly a UX/UI challenge, or is there some clever mechanism to solve this through cryptographic/social hacking? Last question: How will the leadership/dev of OpenBazaar be structured in the future? Will you guys develop something similar to the Linux Foundation under a non-profit charter? Will the foundation enact a transaction fee to fund itself? Sorry for the barrage - just extremely interested as someone who has studied Bitcoin/blockchain tech in the past. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/drwasho/openbazaar-ratings-reviews-and-reputation http://www.slideshare.net/drwasho/openbazaar-ratings-reviews...
lumberjack 11y ago
Early on in 2009-2013 there was a lot of hype in the Bitcoin community over this. Lots of people (including myself) worked on Bitcoin marketplaces and most of them were marketed primarily to sellers because lots of Ebay sellers feel cheated by Ebay. But that is precisely the selling point of Ebay/Paypal. It's a buyer's market so Ebay/Paypal made the correct decision to be biased towards the buyers and that worked very well for them. My friends started buying on Ebay because everybody was assuring them that there was no risk to it. I took the leap as well precisely because of that reason. I don't think escrow is a better preposition even if it is nominally cheaper (there is of course more risk involved, it takes longer and is more complicated, but it is also more private; not sure if it would be overall cheaper when considering all the above). I'd be glad if someone finally managed to take on Ebay but I don't have high hopes. At most people have managed to fill in some niche where Ebay is doing a poor job, usually because it requires some specific knowledge of the merchandise being sold. Open Bazaar will probably follow suit and of course it will be that kind of merchandise.
- hoffmabc 11y ago
  Realistically there are only about 1 million bitcoin users in total worldwide. It is still very early days. We are aiming to make OpenBazaar a common ecommerce standard using Bitcoin that will allow people to build trustworthy marketplaces on top in many different ways. It's not just about overrunning eBay, it's about providing a global, user-driven and open-source network that will grow in scale as Bitcoin does. The escrow capability is certainly an experiment in many ways, but it also is being done in other countries successfully and we think it's one of the best ways to create a marketplace of trustworthy arbiters rather than have a centralized corporation with rigid policies that treat customers unfairly in most cases.
wolfman1 11y ago
Great comment explaining what OpenBazaar may become - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3nlg5g/is_openbazaar_one_of_the_bitcoin_killer_apps/cvph3d3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3nlg5g/is_openbaza... "Interesting. This isn't just a decentralized marketplace, there seems to be something bigger going on. If you look closely at the screenshots, you will see there seems to be a social integration within it too. Notice there is the ability to follow stores. I'd imagine that would mean there will be a feed to consume all the new items and content from the stores you're following too. This isn't going to be the application you pop in to buy something once a month with Bitcoin, it's going to be a social platform with commerce layered in that you visit every day. This seems like what every artist, social media star, author, photographer, musician, etc needs. Build a strong following, post an update of a new song, content or anything and people can pay to play/read it right away. New types of pay to read blogs will likely start to emerge in the market. New social media stars will emerge by creating edgy stores where people can pay them to do/draw/write/sing/play/cook/photograph/wear/eat certain things. A new social channel will come to life and the content and stores will be like something we've never seen on the internet before. It's going to be very very interesting people. This is huge!"
- TylerE 11y ago
  Yes, because paywalls have worked so well historically.
  - orblivion 11y ago
    Paywalls, I would think, are primarily a blocker because the site is wasting my time and asking me for personal info. If my Bitcoin account is already hooked up, I recon those things should go away. We'll have to see how it goes though. I think I'd much rather click one button and pay a tiny amount of Internet Funny Money than watch an obnoxious ad.
  - dmix 11y ago
    NYTimes is doing well and their signup flow is terribly unoptimized nor pseudonymous.
brighton36 11y ago
This project is completely absurd. It started from an open-standard for darknet markets, and pivoted into bad magento clone that requires a special non-http browser and protocol to access. The stores are trivially censored, and there's no efficiency here that will stand up to the preferences of non-libertarian consumers that have no problem with the so-called 'middle man' that is our current state of frictionless purchasing.
- hackerboos 11y ago
  Funny thing is that now it's no good for dark markets because it doesn't work over Tor.
- aianus 11y ago
  > our current state of frictionless purchasing You've obviously never bought anything with Bitcoin if you think credit cards are lower-friction (given that one already has both in his possession).
Glyptodon 11y ago
If this is an open source distributed system without a central business entity deriving revenue from the market what's the reason venture capital is funding the group making it? Just a vested interest in Bitcoin growth/adoption?
- dmix 11y ago
  There have been so many (successful) OSS projects with VC backing since the 1990s that this argument doesn't hold much weight. OSS != no revenue options. There are many business models that exist beyond selling products or taking a percentage.
ufo 11y ago
I think I've lost count at how many different things were said to be the "bitcoin kiler app"
ilostmykeys 11y ago
so what prevents the other 77 altcoins from starting their own p2p market? this sh!t is old...
throwaway7767 11y ago
I wish this ran on TCP, so it could be used through tor. Unfortunately it looks like the protocol is UDP-only.
quantumpotato_ 11y ago
" and the always-active Slack room for the community is packed with about 1,200 users on their 41 channels, each of which is a topic-specific, skype-like chat room." Chat rooms are skype-like now? I suppose if you're talking about closed source.. :)

139 points by nissimk 11y ago

What will prevent seller fraud? (The kind of fraud discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10857478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10857478 ) edit: The site's having trouble, but here's a link to the subreddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jerguismi 11y ago
I guess there is multi-sig escrow built-in somehow. If not, then it is quite stupid project I guess.
- kin 11y ago
  According to their blog, there is a multisig set up. See here: https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/ https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/
- hoffmabc 11y ago
  You have the choice between direct payment transactions which is more risky and should only be used between known parties and then there is a 2 of 3 party multisig escrow transaction that allows a moderator to be an arbitrator for problems and funds are only released if 2 of the 3 parties agree.
- SamPatt 11y ago
  Yes, it uses a 2-of-3 multisig escrow by default. The third party is selected on an open marketplace.
pat2man 11y ago
They have moderators and ratings. Moderators are a third party in a multi sig transaction. More info here: https://blog.openbazaar.org/decentralized-reputation-in-openbazaar/ https://blog.openbazaar.org/decentralized-reputation-in-open...
- joosters 11y ago
  So as well as finding a trustworthy seller, you now have to also find a trustworthy moderator. Hasn't this just doubled the trust problem?
  - pat2man 11y ago
    You don't need to find a trustworthy seller, just a trustworthy moderator. Like buying something on Amazon. You don't trust the seller, you trust Amazon. This is similar to any real world transaction. I can buy directly from someone if I trust them, but if not we both need to agree to use the same third party to facilitate the transaction.
    - joosters 11y ago
      Saying you don't need a trustworthy seller is so obviously wrong... even proper, regulated, reliable and biased-towards-the-buyer companies like eBay and Amazon still publish seller ranks, ratings and reviews. Furthermore, they actively filter out the scammers. You are closing your eyes to the problems OB is creating itself.
      - dmix 11y ago
        This problem exists in market capitalism as well. The solution to this problem is that there will always be a massive incentive not to scam people - to earn a strong reputation and userbase - by being a legitimate business person. Secondly, despite a small minority who are amoral, the vast majority of people aren't short-term thinking opportunistic scammers. The rewards of being legit can be massive and rewarding on a long-term basis. Inspiring others to follow suit. Scamming is always a short-term, high-risk low-reward act that always exists as a niche in every market. The odds will always be against these people because the opposition is better financed and incentivized to counter their schemes. Thirdly, Most consumers have a certain level of tolerance for being scammed but as long as the majority of transactions are legit then the trade-offs of reduced fees, lack of censorship, and pseudonymity will keep people using the market. Finally, if someone doesn't have the tolerance or analytical ability to not get scammed then there still exists many options outside of the market. What matters is a significant enough amount of buyers/sellers use the service. It doesn't need everyone.
exo762 11y ago
OpenBazaar model may be good enough or not good enough. Hard to tell. Fraud prevention may work with help of 3rd party arbiters, but 3rd party may not be 3rd party at all. And it's not even that hard to set up. Situation where seller and buyer have two distinct sets of trusted arbiters is also easy to imagine. There is a much more interesting solution for this problem. No third party needed. Two parties, game theory and one established fact about human psychology could be enough. Idea is following - if any of parties can't possibly gain anything from fraud in the long run, there will be no fraud. To achieve that, buyer freezes two prices of the item, seller freezes one price of the item. Money is frozen atomically, and is defrosted atomically. Money is freed only if both parties are happy. Some studies indicate that people have very strong feelings about justice IF they are dealing with strangers. This should cause strong revulsion of any unjust solution (e.g. buyer caving in just to unfreeze some of frozen money). To prevent such blackmail and other forms of psychological manipulation, both parties are anonymous by default and can't communicate using this software. Project is called Bitmarkets [1], it's published on MIT license and it's amazing. Read about it. [1] https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/ https://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/
- RealityVoid 11y ago
  That is great! I was just thinking that might be a viable solution to the escrow problem. Will check out bitmarkets, I think those guys are onto something. On the other Hand, OpenBazaar also has the social and rating system going for it, I'd love to eventually to see a solution fusing these two.
- soared 11y ago
  Very interesting idea. I haven't read through your link entirely, but I'm always a bit of wary of things based on how we think humans should behave and not how we actually see them behave.

pakled_engineer 11y ago

Of course the 'money' in this is abstracting away the complexities of Open Bazaar with your own app since their example GUI is pretty confounding. For example create a designer clothing app that only lists other designer clothing listings (to not scare away customers who discover a bunch of heroin for sale on OB with the regular GUI), then sell the ranking they appear in your app, or in app ads as a small example. I don't like the Moderator rating system though, seems too easy to game and has too many worthless stages 1-5. Bitcoin-OTC ratings are more clear. The rating "This is a scam avoid at all costs" opens the door for legal issues of people trying to sue the developers like when Ebay gave up on negative feedback due to too many lawsuits. Of course there is also issues of governments trying to shut down this completely due to weapons and narcotics undoubtedly being sold on OB in the future, I assume the creators have a plan for dealing with that inevitable gov harassment. The creators/maintainers should also be careful where they travel, if they fly to say, China, Indonesia or Turkey for any reasons they could be arrested there and pushed through a kangaroo court.

asciimo 11y ago
Is BitTorrent, Inc. harassed in these ways?
- pakled_engineer 11y ago
  Cohen and Navin made a deal with the MPAA to remove links to illegal content on the official BitTorrent website which opened the door for 3rd party tracker sites like the piratebay to do so. I imagine this will happen with OB the official app will be crippled by lawsuits but of course this all depends what they have told each other in private unencrypted emails and the dev mailing list. There's already a thread where Patterson advocates to recommend suggesting that developers talking about OpenBazaar with the public cite example products that are “illicit but socially acceptable" such as Fireworks and Radar Detectors. “Stuff that people wouldn’t disagree with but is technically illegal to sell because of stupid laws.” Seems nobody has learned from the Megaupload case how you can talk yourself into problems with overzealous prosecutors.
  - 11y ago

asciimo 11y ago

I have a ton of stuff in my garage patiently waiting for Open Bazaar. (That's my current excuse, anyway.)

brighton36 11y ago
Why not just use craigslist or ebay?

nols 11y ago

Hasn't this been upcoming for awhile now? Are they releasing soon?

officialjunk 11y ago

bitcoin itself once had a market built in that was removed by satoshi in this changelist: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995ede03fb934edd67f1359ba8 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995e...

LukeHoersten 11y ago
I've never seen that before. Thanks for pointing to the revision. Very cool.
- officialjunk 11y ago
  must have been a bittersweet valentines day for satoshi too ;)
junseth 11y ago
Wow! That seems very Drop Zone-ish https://github.com/17Q4MX2hmktmpuUKHFuoRmS5MfB5XPbhod https://github.com/17Q4MX2hmktmpuUKHFuoRmS5MfB5XPbhod

pbreit 11y ago

Is there a nickname or law describing the pre-announcement of something being a killer app that essentially predicts its doom?

nsns 11y ago
app killer?
SamPatt 11y ago
To be fair, I'm an OpenBazaar dev and I don't think anyone on our team is calling this the killer app of Bitcoin. Of course we have great faith in it, and expect it will be a great match for Bitcoin (decentralized markets for decentralized money) but we're not claiming this is the project to end all other Bitcoin projects. It's great to see so many people excited about it though.
- pbreit 11y ago
  I hear ya. Self-proclaimed, which I didn't really mean to imply here, would be even worse.
philippnagel 11y ago
A pre-killed app?
mhuffman 11y ago
Daikatana Syndrome?
Cyberdog 11y ago
"Pride comes before a fall."

SamPatt 11y ago

Hey everyone, I'm Sam and I work on the OpenBazaar project. Happy to answer questions if anyone has them. Looks like their site is down, here's a simple overview: https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/ https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/ We're getting close to launch and we'd love as many eyes on the code as possible. Here's our backend, built in Python: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server And our client: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Client https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Client If you want to try it yourself I recommend you join our Slack and ask for help. We're building installers and packages now but I'm sure most people here could handle the manual installation process if they're curious. You can invite yourself to the Slack here: https://openbazaar-slackin-drwasho.herokuapp.com/ https://openbazaar-slackin-drwasho.herokuapp.com/ Cheers!

roymurdock 11y ago
So if I understand correctly, OpenBazaar will be shifting costs from a central verification and fulfillment agency (Amazon, Visa, etc.) onto the buyers, sellers, and moderators of the market? Buyers will have to spend more time researching vendors and moderators, then agreeing with a vendor on a moderator which will be difficult as no moderator can be 100% impartial and the largest 5-6 (that will develop due to natural economies of scale) will develop their own brands and reputations for being easy on buyers, easy on sellers, random coin toss, etc. Where is this cost made up for the buyers - will they see lower prices? Wouldn't it be more expensive as moderators need to be compensated for their services? Also, from the pitch deck linked in the article [1] slides 48-51: What about moderator reputation? Difficult problem to solve as there will always be on party that is happy with the result, and one that is unhappy. Transparency is the best approach...Negative or positive consensus on the quality of dispute resolution will inform Vendors and Buyers How can there be a consensus on a moderator if one party is always happy and one is always unhappy? Won't the consensus always be 50/50? Also, how do you plan to scale up transparency? Is that mostly a UX/UI challenge, or is there some clever mechanism to solve this through cryptographic/social hacking? Last question: How will the leadership/dev of OpenBazaar be structured in the future? Will you guys develop something similar to the Linux Foundation under a non-profit charter? Will the foundation enact a transaction fee to fund itself? Sorry for the barrage - just extremely interested as someone who has studied Bitcoin/blockchain tech in the past. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/drwasho/openbazaar-ratings-reviews-and-reputation http://www.slideshare.net/drwasho/openbazaar-ratings-reviews...

lumberjack 11y ago

Early on in 2009-2013 there was a lot of hype in the Bitcoin community over this. Lots of people (including myself) worked on Bitcoin marketplaces and most of them were marketed primarily to sellers because lots of Ebay sellers feel cheated by Ebay. But that is precisely the selling point of Ebay/Paypal. It's a buyer's market so Ebay/Paypal made the correct decision to be biased towards the buyers and that worked very well for them. My friends started buying on Ebay because everybody was assuring them that there was no risk to it. I took the leap as well precisely because of that reason. I don't think escrow is a better preposition even if it is nominally cheaper (there is of course more risk involved, it takes longer and is more complicated, but it is also more private; not sure if it would be overall cheaper when considering all the above). I'd be glad if someone finally managed to take on Ebay but I don't have high hopes. At most people have managed to fill in some niche where Ebay is doing a poor job, usually because it requires some specific knowledge of the merchandise being sold. Open Bazaar will probably follow suit and of course it will be that kind of merchandise.

hoffmabc 11y ago
Realistically there are only about 1 million bitcoin users in total worldwide. It is still very early days. We are aiming to make OpenBazaar a common ecommerce standard using Bitcoin that will allow people to build trustworthy marketplaces on top in many different ways. It's not just about overrunning eBay, it's about providing a global, user-driven and open-source network that will grow in scale as Bitcoin does. The escrow capability is certainly an experiment in many ways, but it also is being done in other countries successfully and we think it's one of the best ways to create a marketplace of trustworthy arbiters rather than have a centralized corporation with rigid policies that treat customers unfairly in most cases.

wolfman1 11y ago

Great comment explaining what OpenBazaar may become - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3nlg5g/is_openbazaar_one_of_the_bitcoin_killer_apps/cvph3d3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3nlg5g/is_openbaza... "Interesting. This isn't just a decentralized marketplace, there seems to be something bigger going on. If you look closely at the screenshots, you will see there seems to be a social integration within it too. Notice there is the ability to follow stores. I'd imagine that would mean there will be a feed to consume all the new items and content from the stores you're following too. This isn't going to be the application you pop in to buy something once a month with Bitcoin, it's going to be a social platform with commerce layered in that you visit every day. This seems like what every artist, social media star, author, photographer, musician, etc needs. Build a strong following, post an update of a new song, content or anything and people can pay to play/read it right away. New types of pay to read blogs will likely start to emerge in the market. New social media stars will emerge by creating edgy stores where people can pay them to do/draw/write/sing/play/cook/photograph/wear/eat certain things. A new social channel will come to life and the content and stores will be like something we've never seen on the internet before. It's going to be very very interesting people. This is huge!"

TylerE 11y ago
Yes, because paywalls have worked so well historically.
- orblivion 11y ago
  Paywalls, I would think, are primarily a blocker because the site is wasting my time and asking me for personal info. If my Bitcoin account is already hooked up, I recon those things should go away. We'll have to see how it goes though. I think I'd much rather click one button and pay a tiny amount of Internet Funny Money than watch an obnoxious ad.
- dmix 11y ago
  NYTimes is doing well and their signup flow is terribly unoptimized nor pseudonymous.

brighton36 11y ago

This project is completely absurd. It started from an open-standard for darknet markets, and pivoted into bad magento clone that requires a special non-http browser and protocol to access. The stores are trivially censored, and there's no efficiency here that will stand up to the preferences of non-libertarian consumers that have no problem with the so-called 'middle man' that is our current state of frictionless purchasing.

hackerboos 11y ago
Funny thing is that now it's no good for dark markets because it doesn't work over Tor.
aianus 11y ago
> our current state of frictionless purchasing You've obviously never bought anything with Bitcoin if you think credit cards are lower-friction (given that one already has both in his possession).

Glyptodon 11y ago

If this is an open source distributed system without a central business entity deriving revenue from the market what's the reason venture capital is funding the group making it? Just a vested interest in Bitcoin growth/adoption?

dmix 11y ago
There have been so many (successful) OSS projects with VC backing since the 1990s that this argument doesn't hold much weight. OSS != no revenue options. There are many business models that exist beyond selling products or taking a percentage.

ufo 11y ago

I think I've lost count at how many different things were said to be the "bitcoin kiler app"

ilostmykeys 11y ago

so what prevents the other 77 altcoins from starting their own p2p market? this sh!t is old...

throwaway7767 11y ago

I wish this ran on TCP, so it could be used through tor. Unfortunately it looks like the protocol is UDP-only.

quantumpotato_ 11y ago

" and the always-active Slack room for the community is packed with about 1,200 users on their 41 channels, each of which is a topic-specific, skype-like chat room." Chat rooms are skype-like now? I suppose if you're talking about closed source.. :)