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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 ne

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-trade-takes-the-next-step-4d75b7f23ec8 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 https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go

sillysaurus3 9y ago
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 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?
- SamPatt 9y ago
  Keep in mind that OpenBazaar has been used for over a year now, and only a small minority of the trade has been illicit. Most people just want a platform where they can buy / sell in crypto and avoid marketplace fees. We built OpenBazaar to be an agnostic protocol for trade online. It's like any other protocol in that it's neutral, and people can use it how they please. I don't like the idea of people using it for immoral things, but that's their decision. I know linking to a reddit thread might be heresy here, but I talked about the more on our subreddit (I'm CC_EF_JTF): https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oi2k0/rules_of_open_bazaar/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oi2k0/rules_of...
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    After digging into some Reddit comments, this reply appears to downplay the extent to which you're directly facilitating the darknet market migration. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_possible_to_load_ob_20_on_tails_os/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_po... "Well if the devs want massive adoption and 2.0 is functional then getting it to work on tails in the next 3 months will get them that." "If someone would post an eli18 walkthrough on how to config tails so that OB 2.0 will work when that comes out that'd be great." https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6opqii/i_read_somewhere_that_a_working_ob2_would_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6opqii/i_read_s... "It's actually about to enter the alpha testing phase. Tor is working with some manual steps. You can test out a week-old build here." The situation appears to be that OpenBazaar has been used for a year for mostly legal trade due to the technical hurdles of using Open Bazaar with identity-hiding software like Tor and Tails. In fact, OpenBazaar does not work at all on Tails, though work is ongoing to promote this use case (https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_possible_to_load_ob_20_on_tails_os/dkhlr2v/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_po...) and a release with Tor support is scheduled for August. In fact, most of the recent activity on the OpenBazaar subreddit has been questions about exactly that: sale of illegal substances. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oigt2/so_i_heard_of_v2_but/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oigt2/so_i_hea... It feels like Open Bazaar is poised to become the next Silk Road. The keystone to achieve that is Tor support plus a Tails walkthrough guide. Both of these seem to be on the verge of being released. I just wanted to clarify for onlookers that the Open Bazaar team seems to be going into this with both eyes open. Developing a protocol is one thing. Going out of your way to enable anonymity as a means of acquiring users is a very interesting tactic. It's doubly interesting to repeatedly claim that Open Bazaar was not developed as a darknet market and "may not work for that use case" while also accepting merge requests for Tor support and eventually providing binaries that will work on Tails. According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14829076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14829076 OB has taken $4M of investment. Perhaps investors are pushing you to acquire users. The DarkNet market crowd is certainly a large target market. Or perhaps all of your intentions are as transparent as you claim, and you're innocently laying the foundation to become the next Silk Road -- an unstoppable decentralized market accountable to no one.
- notliketherest 9y ago
  Dear Vint Cerf, since you have created TCP-IP, and another contemporary of yours - HTTP, you seem to be tacitly encouraging a decentralized worldwide exchange of information used by billions around the globe to facilitate exchange of ideas, pleasure, and commerce, free from government censor...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - matthewbauer 9y ago
    I thinks it totally different. At the end of the day, the law could reach the original Internet. It really wasn't much different than telephone lines. Encryption is where everything changes. I think everyone should be at least a little bit nervous about where these crypto technologies are taking us. Once criminals learn how to use this technology, there's probably no going back.
    - csuwldcat 9y ago
      Drug purchasing sites have actually helped reduce violence and crime associated with prohibited items/activities. I'm more nervous about where authoritarian government is taking us.
      - Evelin789 9y ago
        like Dawn replied I'm shocked that someone able to profit $8730 in a few weeks on the > internet . you can try this out>>>>>>>>>>>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ
      - soupbowl 9y ago
        * citation needed.
        xtracto 9y ago
        Well, there are some that I know. The original is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2436643 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2436643 Then there is Neil Franklin a Maryland police officer and director of the organization "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc29nw4Si3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc29nw4Si3Y And his interview in the Deep Web documentary at minute 60 (it is in Netflix).
- coding123 9y ago
  Why does everything have to be subject to govt control?
  - petre 9y ago
    Because gov't tends to control everything over time, as it becomes more and more powerful. Rewind that back to the American Revolution and you'd see the federal gov't being less autocratic and states being more autonomous. The Civil War was a turning point. This is not a case with the UK however, because they did not have an equivalent of the French Revolution.
orf 9y ago
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)?
- Victoria88 9y ago
  Im making over $13k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life.This is what I do… :) AND GOOD LUCK.:) www.joinmate2.comCOPY THE LINK. :) AND GOOD LUCK.:) WoRk at hOMe
- SamPatt 9y ago
  I'm not one of the developers, who would be able to answer this definitively (you can join our slack if you like to ask). But I believe it's accomplished by using IPNS for some of the calls instead of IPFS, to ensure that the data is up to date. It does mean that one of the benefits of using IPFS - the seeding of data - only works when there aren't frequent changes to a store. The idea is setting a store up and being able to go offline for a few days while others seed, then when you come back online and make changes, the new changes need to get re-seeded again.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    IPFS is smart enough to handle changes per-object (maybe per-block even?), so you don't need to change everything, unchanged things still get seeded by the people who already had them.
- cpacia 9y ago
  All the store data is kept inside a directory, the hash of which is mapped to your peer ID using IPNS. This enables all store data to be downloaded and authenticated using the peer ID. Any change to the contents of your directory causes the root hash to change and the IPNS mapping is republished. Mappings a numbered so when looking up a store via it's ID nodes will always use the most recent mapping they can find. Republishing the IPNS root breaks the caching that accumulated on the root, but all objects inside the directory that haven't changed retain their caching.
StavrosK 9y ago
How stable is 2.0? Could I start playing with it now if I'm only taking a look around?
- SamPatt 9y ago
  The development pace is pretty feverish, so no guarantees, but you should be able to play around with these week-old test builds: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-desktop/releases/tag/v2.0.5 https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-desktop/releases/ta... Edit: Note that this uses Testnet Bitcoin, not real bitcoin yet. Also, purchasing might not work since we're still making breaking changes somewhat often. We're about to enter the alpha testing phase so if people want an invite let me know.
kvee 9y ago
It won't let me buy anything from any of the vendors I've tried It says: "The vendor's server has rejected the purchase request. This may be due to a connection issue. Check your purchase data, such as quantity and Bitcoin refund address, to make sure it is valid. If it is valid, try again in a few seconds. Reason: vendor rejected contract". I've also gotten " Reason: unable to reach vendor" Has anyone successfully bought anything recently?
- SamPatt 9y ago
  I run the main OB store, and I haven't noted problems selling. One of the difficulties of running a p2p network is that you cannot control how up to date the software is from other peers. We try to keep as much compatibility as possible when making changes, but the network has been live over a year now and never everyone stays updated. Many of the problems we had with the current version are also alleviated with the 2.0 we are releasing soon.
  - kvee 9y ago
    I get this error when trying to buy stuff from the main OB store (just tried with a t shirt)
  - noloblo 9y ago
    I got an error too
- shp0ngle 9y ago
  OpenBazaar never worked for me either. The only time I actually bought something, the seller laughed me off and didn't post anything. Messages to "moderator" were ignored. Since using the software is painful (it's an Electron app after all), I gave up. I think that has been the experience of everyone that actually tried it more than once
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  Same problem here, with different products from different vendors and several retries. My guess would be some packets blocked by my firewall, but I haven't tried to verify this.
hellbanner 9y ago
Hello, I looked at OpenBazaar and it looks to be organized around physical goods (which is great, great job on the tool). Is there a marketplace I can use to sell digital goods and receive BTC for automatically?
- solotronics 9y ago
  there is no reason you can't do that with OB. there is a REST API so you can make your own tools that send the digital good once payment is received.
- tylersmith 9y ago
  We support digital goods and services as well, physical goods have just been the most popular so far. We don't have the automation nailed down quite yet so for now you still need to manually process orders.
  - hellbanner 9y ago
    "quite yet".. does this mean you're working on it? That's exciting! I want to run a store like www.itch.io (DRM free games) that accepts BTC. I'm also interested in automating microtransactions for games.
solotronics 9y ago
what is the plan if people start selling goods typically associated with the dark net markets?
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  It is up to individual sellers what they sell on OB. OB is just the platform.
matthewbauer 9y ago
Are you concerned at all about legal ramifications of OpenBazaar? It seems like if you guys succeed, you're going to have to deal with lots of illegal transactions. Are you able or willing to work with law enforcement in these cases?
- mirimir 9y ago
  One would expect that devs would be unable to assist law enforcement. Except to say that it's hopeless. That's pretty much what Tor Project says. Maybe that's just BS, of course. But one can hope. An official statement from OpenBazaar devs would be good.
  - ven_bug_trap 9y ago
    Yeah, one would hope that cooperation with law enforcement would be hopeless. Otherwise the decentralised nature of OB, and its impartiality, would be called into question.
- problems 9y ago
  They have to tread very, very carefully here. I seem to remember early demo screenshots with weed as a sample product. Not exactly a good call. There's a reason all the piracy tools show things like Big Buck Bunny downloading, playing, etc. You may want the illegal uses to be present on the service - I don't blame them I like the anarchic feeling of it and the lack of regulation that is possible in the system, it's beautiful in a way - but you can't go around advertising it for law breaking purposes, condoning that kind of thing will just get you screwed too.
  - ven_bug_trap 9y ago
    Yeah, the kind of person who's alerted of this tech's criminal potential by pictures of weed etc., rather than knowing about it through other means, isn't the type of person you would feel safe conducting an illegal transaction with.
  - deckar01 9y ago

sillysaurus3 9y ago

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 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?

SamPatt 9y ago
Keep in mind that OpenBazaar has been used for over a year now, and only a small minority of the trade has been illicit. Most people just want a platform where they can buy / sell in crypto and avoid marketplace fees. We built OpenBazaar to be an agnostic protocol for trade online. It's like any other protocol in that it's neutral, and people can use it how they please. I don't like the idea of people using it for immoral things, but that's their decision. I know linking to a reddit thread might be heresy here, but I talked about the more on our subreddit (I'm CC_EF_JTF): https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oi2k0/rules_of_open_bazaar/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oi2k0/rules_of...
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  After digging into some Reddit comments, this reply appears to downplay the extent to which you're directly facilitating the darknet market migration. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_possible_to_load_ob_20_on_tails_os/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_po... "Well if the devs want massive adoption and 2.0 is functional then getting it to work on tails in the next 3 months will get them that." "If someone would post an eli18 walkthrough on how to config tails so that OB 2.0 will work when that comes out that'd be great." https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6opqii/i_read_somewhere_that_a_working_ob2_would_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6opqii/i_read_s... "It's actually about to enter the alpha testing phase. Tor is working with some manual steps. You can test out a week-old build here." The situation appears to be that OpenBazaar has been used for a year for mostly legal trade due to the technical hurdles of using Open Bazaar with identity-hiding software like Tor and Tails. In fact, OpenBazaar does not work at all on Tails, though work is ongoing to promote this use case (https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_possible_to_load_ob_20_on_tails_os/dkhlr2v/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_po...) and a release with Tor support is scheduled for August. In fact, most of the recent activity on the OpenBazaar subreddit has been questions about exactly that: sale of illegal substances. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oigt2/so_i_heard_of_v2_but/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oigt2/so_i_hea... It feels like Open Bazaar is poised to become the next Silk Road. The keystone to achieve that is Tor support plus a Tails walkthrough guide. Both of these seem to be on the verge of being released. I just wanted to clarify for onlookers that the Open Bazaar team seems to be going into this with both eyes open. Developing a protocol is one thing. Going out of your way to enable anonymity as a means of acquiring users is a very interesting tactic. It's doubly interesting to repeatedly claim that Open Bazaar was not developed as a darknet market and "may not work for that use case" while also accepting merge requests for Tor support and eventually providing binaries that will work on Tails. According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14829076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14829076 OB has taken $4M of investment. Perhaps investors are pushing you to acquire users. The DarkNet market crowd is certainly a large target market. Or perhaps all of your intentions are as transparent as you claim, and you're innocently laying the foundation to become the next Silk Road -- an unstoppable decentralized market accountable to no one.
notliketherest 9y ago
Dear Vint Cerf, since you have created TCP-IP, and another contemporary of yours - HTTP, you seem to be tacitly encouraging a decentralized worldwide exchange of information used by billions around the globe to facilitate exchange of ideas, pleasure, and commerce, free from government censor...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- matthewbauer 9y ago
  I thinks it totally different. At the end of the day, the law could reach the original Internet. It really wasn't much different than telephone lines. Encryption is where everything changes. I think everyone should be at least a little bit nervous about where these crypto technologies are taking us. Once criminals learn how to use this technology, there's probably no going back.
  - csuwldcat 9y ago
    Drug purchasing sites have actually helped reduce violence and crime associated with prohibited items/activities. I'm more nervous about where authoritarian government is taking us.
    - Evelin789 9y ago
      like Dawn replied I'm shocked that someone able to profit $8730 in a few weeks on the > internet . you can try this out>>>>>>>>>>>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ
    - soupbowl 9y ago
      * citation needed.
      - xtracto 9y ago
        Well, there are some that I know. The original is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2436643 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2436643 Then there is Neil Franklin a Maryland police officer and director of the organization "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc29nw4Si3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc29nw4Si3Y And his interview in the Deep Web documentary at minute 60 (it is in Netflix).
coding123 9y ago
Why does everything have to be subject to govt control?
- petre 9y ago
  Because gov't tends to control everything over time, as it becomes more and more powerful. Rewind that back to the American Revolution and you'd see the federal gov't being less autocratic and states being more autonomous. The Civil War was a turning point. This is not a case with the UK however, because they did not have an equivalent of the French Revolution.

orf 9y ago

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)?

Victoria88 9y ago
Im making over $13k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life.This is what I do… :) AND GOOD LUCK.:) www.joinmate2.comCOPY THE LINK. :) AND GOOD LUCK.:) WoRk at hOMe
SamPatt 9y ago
I'm not one of the developers, who would be able to answer this definitively (you can join our slack if you like to ask). But I believe it's accomplished by using IPNS for some of the calls instead of IPFS, to ensure that the data is up to date. It does mean that one of the benefits of using IPFS - the seeding of data - only works when there aren't frequent changes to a store. The idea is setting a store up and being able to go offline for a few days while others seed, then when you come back online and make changes, the new changes need to get re-seeded again.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  IPFS is smart enough to handle changes per-object (maybe per-block even?), so you don't need to change everything, unchanged things still get seeded by the people who already had them.
cpacia 9y ago
All the store data is kept inside a directory, the hash of which is mapped to your peer ID using IPNS. This enables all store data to be downloaded and authenticated using the peer ID. Any change to the contents of your directory causes the root hash to change and the IPNS mapping is republished. Mappings a numbered so when looking up a store via it's ID nodes will always use the most recent mapping they can find. Republishing the IPNS root breaks the caching that accumulated on the root, but all objects inside the directory that haven't changed retain their caching.

StavrosK 9y ago

How stable is 2.0? Could I start playing with it now if I'm only taking a look around?

SamPatt 9y ago
The development pace is pretty feverish, so no guarantees, but you should be able to play around with these week-old test builds: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-desktop/releases/tag/v2.0.5 https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-desktop/releases/ta... Edit: Note that this uses Testnet Bitcoin, not real bitcoin yet. Also, purchasing might not work since we're still making breaking changes somewhat often. We're about to enter the alpha testing phase so if people want an invite let me know.

kvee 9y ago

It won't let me buy anything from any of the vendors I've tried It says: "The vendor's server has rejected the purchase request. This may be due to a connection issue. Check your purchase data, such as quantity and Bitcoin refund address, to make sure it is valid. If it is valid, try again in a few seconds. Reason: vendor rejected contract". I've also gotten " Reason: unable to reach vendor" Has anyone successfully bought anything recently?

SamPatt 9y ago
I run the main OB store, and I haven't noted problems selling. One of the difficulties of running a p2p network is that you cannot control how up to date the software is from other peers. We try to keep as much compatibility as possible when making changes, but the network has been live over a year now and never everyone stays updated. Many of the problems we had with the current version are also alleviated with the 2.0 we are releasing soon.
- kvee 9y ago
  I get this error when trying to buy stuff from the main OB store (just tried with a t shirt)
- noloblo 9y ago
  I got an error too
shp0ngle 9y ago
OpenBazaar never worked for me either. The only time I actually bought something, the seller laughed me off and didn't post anything. Messages to "moderator" were ignored. Since using the software is painful (it's an Electron app after all), I gave up. I think that has been the experience of everyone that actually tried it more than once
tom_mellior 9y ago
Same problem here, with different products from different vendors and several retries. My guess would be some packets blocked by my firewall, but I haven't tried to verify this.

hellbanner 9y ago

Hello, I looked at OpenBazaar and it looks to be organized around physical goods (which is great, great job on the tool). Is there a marketplace I can use to sell digital goods and receive BTC for automatically?

solotronics 9y ago
there is no reason you can't do that with OB. there is a REST API so you can make your own tools that send the digital good once payment is received.
tylersmith 9y ago
We support digital goods and services as well, physical goods have just been the most popular so far. We don't have the automation nailed down quite yet so for now you still need to manually process orders.
- hellbanner 9y ago
  "quite yet".. does this mean you're working on it? That's exciting! I want to run a store like www.itch.io (DRM free games) that accepts BTC. I'm also interested in automating microtransactions for games.

solotronics 9y ago

what is the plan if people start selling goods typically associated with the dark net markets?

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
It is up to individual sellers what they sell on OB. OB is just the platform.

matthewbauer 9y ago

Are you concerned at all about legal ramifications of OpenBazaar? It seems like if you guys succeed, you're going to have to deal with lots of illegal transactions. Are you able or willing to work with law enforcement in these cases?

mirimir 9y ago
One would expect that devs would be unable to assist law enforcement. Except to say that it's hopeless. That's pretty much what Tor Project says. Maybe that's just BS, of course. But one can hope. An official statement from OpenBazaar devs would be good.
- ven_bug_trap 9y ago
  Yeah, one would hope that cooperation with law enforcement would be hopeless. Otherwise the decentralised nature of OB, and its impartiality, would be called into question.
problems 9y ago
They have to tread very, very carefully here. I seem to remember early demo screenshots with weed as a sample product. Not exactly a good call. There's a reason all the piracy tools show things like Big Buck Bunny downloading, playing, etc. You may want the illegal uses to be present on the service - I don't blame them I like the anarchic feeling of it and the lack of regulation that is possible in the system, it's beautiful in a way - but you can't go around advertising it for law breaking purposes, condoning that kind of thing will just get you screwed too.
- ven_bug_trap 9y ago
  Yeah, the kind of person who's alerted of this tech's criminal potential by pictures of weed etc., rather than knowing about it through other means, isn't the type of person you would feel safe conducting an illegal transaction with.
- deckar01 9y ago