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Nile: decentralized, commission-free, local-economy focused Amazon alternative

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
goda90 8y ago
Would this gave the option for one organization in a city to do the work for small stores? I can imagine stores might not have the resources to host a part of this, but maybe the municipality, a co-op, or a large company that wants to support the local economy could host it. This comes to mind because my employer wouldn't have a need for this since we make enterprise software, but we profess to support the local economy via hosting a farmer's market, using local food when possible in our cafeteria, encouraging local bookstores for reimbursable education materials, and even sponsoring the local public radio. We would have way more resources to host an instance than a corner shop that sells yarn.
- wukerplank 8y ago
  There are businesses built on top of local economies, e.g. Atalanda in Germany: https://atalanda.com/ https://atalanda.com/ (I'm not affiliated, but I know people who work there.) They partner up with local businesses for the goods and bike courier services for the delivery.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I imagine it would be hosted (and funded and administrated) by the local business association, with tech support coming from a global foundation (same one developing the product).
chosenbreed 8y ago
Mmm...interesting idea...a bit Utopian...I'm not sure the world works that way...good luck to anyone investing their time, effort or other resources to get this going.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Much of what we take for granted in the modern world looked utopian before it was available.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
    Not sure in which way e.g. the telephone or lightbulb looked utopian at the time. Most inventions had similar predecessors. Perhaps you're thinking of social inventions like the social security nets in western Europe - I'm not as good in their history.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  Its great in theory practice not so much. Delivery is complicated on a logistical level, especially for larger items that bikers cannot move (e.g. things not like uberEats). You have to deal with dimensional weights, freight classes, fuel rates, concealed damaged, among other things
bovermyer 8y ago
The software piece of this is not the hard part. The social piece is. Admirable goal, but good luck getting wide enough adoption to achieve viability.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- wild_preference 8y ago
  This explains just about everything. Can’t remember all the times I’ve read some pompous HN comment “pah, I could build it” and then thought, “well, you’d be just 0.01% of the way there.” Nothing kills this delusion more than spending a year building something that you can’t seem to successfully market... multiple times. Then you realize there’s almost zero value in the technical part, and you can only chuckle at HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if that’s the crux of a new business.
  - thidatysa 8y ago
    yet there would be nothing to market without the technical part so how can it have zero value ? maybe your marketing has zero value because you're doing it wrong
    - RussianCow 8y ago
      If you have good marketing/sales but terrible tech, you can still be incredibly successful. It's much harder to go the other way around.
      - ythn 8y ago
        And that's a darn shame. As a result we have markets saturated with snake oil while the good stuff (medicine) rots away in obscurity.
        baq 8y ago
microcolonel 8y ago
So you're saying you're going to market your way of distributing products by insisting you "pay [more] taxes [than Amazon is obligated to]" and paying more for labour? What exactly should make the most expensive available retailer win purchases from Amazon? This is not a business plan, this is an economically illiterate wet fantasy for yuppies.
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  So what's your fantasy?
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    Irrelevant, that's what it is.
- JackFr 8y ago
  Or to put it another way, Amazon grew by taking margin from retailers and giving it back to customers. Amazon is successful not because they underpay employees or evade local sales taxes, but because the do a better job at retail than most retailers do. If you're inviting me to take part in an exercise to return margin to the retailers from the consumers, I'll politely decline participation in this farce.
  - gonvaled 8y ago
    I am not sure how Amazon grew, but it is a fact that, nowadays, they are paying low wages, and that they are paying very little tax.
    - chosenbreed 8y ago
      To be fair though the corporate tax rates in the US are relatively high. I dare say anyone company in their position would do the same. Another point to mention is that I don't think they're as profitable as the other giants Apple, Google though their revenues are humongous...I hear some big corporations sitting on stockpiles of cash are waiting for the rate to come down before re-repatriating their profits :-)
Arzh 8y ago
This is / can be filled by craigslist or facebook marketplace.
- waffle_ss 8y ago
  No, this is for combining a local area's retail stores' inventory into a unified shopping interface, and a courier service for seamless delivery (e.g. so you don't have to visit stores x, y, z to complete pickup of a single order with items from disparate stores). Not individuals hawking their used junk.
  - Arzh 8y ago
    Stores are already doing that on craigslist and facebook, this would just be hooking up a delivery service to it and you have it. Still seems like a pretty weak idea.
    - waffle_ss 8y ago
      I'd love to know how stores are synchronizing their entire shelf+backstock inventory to Craiglist or FB Marketplace given neither service even has an API (Craiglist allows bulk posting but that's useless if you can't bulk delete/update for availability) or even basic metadata like product quantity, UPC/EAN, etc. Ignoring that, the services you're talking about don't even do any kind of canonicalization or grouping of products like Amazon, so if you search for "Xbox" you're going to have to click through many pages of individual listings rather than having a unified product page displaying product details and specs from the manufacturer, consumer reviews, related product variants (e.g. color), etc. It's fine if you think the idea's weak but at least give the idea a fair shake before dismissing it.
usermac 8y ago
Amazon pays no taxes? Got this from the introduction.
- jamroom 8y ago
  Looks like they paid no US income taxes in 2017: https://www.seattlepi.com/business/tech/article/Amazon-paid-no-US-income-taxes-for-2017-12713961.php https://www.seattlepi.com/business/tech/article/Amazon-paid-...
  - chosenbreed 8y ago
    I couldn't access that the article...are they saying that people who work for Amazon paid no income tax?
    - gonvaled 8y ago
      Which is related to Amazon paying taxes ... exactly how?
    - mandelbulb 8y ago
      https://outline.com/Kc2y7F https://outline.com/Kc2y7F
    - metamicah 8y ago
      No, it's corporate income tax, a direct tax imposed by the federal government on corporations. The rate can be 15% to 35% but there are so many deductions available that large companies like Amazon are often able to dodge it completely. For instance, the article mentions a $917 million deduction on stock options exercised by employees, which was probably the bulk of the deductions.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Because, rightly, corporations do not pay tax on revenue, but on profit. The reason for this is that it should not cost more in taxes to buy something from a company which has secondary suppliers, than from a vertical company.
nudpiedo 8y ago
I am not sure whether the name "Nile" was picked because of the "Amazon" river or because Nile is a symbol of being the only major river flowing from south to north. The former would be mundane, the later a great metaphor.
- jackbravo 8y ago
  ¿Por qué no los dos? :-p
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  Found your claim astonishing, so googled it. Looks like this is not true, at least the Ob river (3,650 km) and the Yenisei river (3,438 km) are major rivers flowing from South to North (Both top 10 rivers). So not sure where you did get that piece about the Nile from.
  - test6554 8y ago
    It's a common misunderstanding. I've heard this "fun fact" mentioned in grade school.
  - macintux 8y ago
    When I was in grade school, my science teacher told the class rivers couldn't flow north because, on a globe, north is up. Somehow pointing out the Nile wasn't conclusive evidence against it. Public education in America!
    - komali2 8y ago
      Ooooh is this a subthread for ranting about public education in a America? Cause I come from a family of teachers and I have WORDS! In a little school district in Texas, we can't use the word "adaptation" in our cellular biology section. Recent history textbooks use strange language around black slaves that seems to imply they were "workers," rather than, you know, slaves. Eh. I'll stop. I gave up on teaching ages ago, but my mom still gets drummed up in front of the principal at least monthly for some bullshit. Most recently because the students have a shared box of basic supplies at their little desk pods (scissors and markers), and some mom demanded her son be allowed to use his own supplies because she didn't want him using the "Communist supplies." Verbatim quote. She thought it would teach him the values of communism. Obviously my mom told her to fuck off in no uncertain terms, so stern meeting with the principal for July...
X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
Openbazzar?
- k1ns 8y ago
  When I went to Google that, the first autocomplete was "openbazaar drugs".
  - SamPatt 8y ago
    And?
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
    If you make a decentralized marketplace don't be surprised when it's used for illegal goods.
  - ofrzeta 8y ago
    That must be based on your search history :) I get completions in the following order: search, token, tor, github, 2.0, shops, blockhain
krmmalik 8y ago
Hi. What you're describing is a public market much like those that were in Andalus and also in use by the Greeks and for the reasons mentioned on the GitHub page this is what led to the prosperity of those societies. I have a unique set of skills when it comes to Strategy, process and narrative. Soft skills basically. I would love to get involved or at least have a chat with the founders of how I may be able to help. If the founders are reading this, please tell me how I can get on touch.
foxhop 8y ago
Hey there, I have the same vision. I drafted a blog post on Friday (just published it) discussing the first phase that I plan set in motion. I would like to partner up with you on this. Reference: https://russell.ballestrini.net/all-local-heros-need-a-gig-side-kick/ https://russell.ballestrini.net/all-local-heros-need-a-gig-s...
asimpletune 8y ago
Where are you based?
nickdandakis 8y ago
I love how oblivious (blissfully ignorant?) the "How will you earn money?" section is. > The application is decentralized so we just need money for the developers, the lawyers and the advertisers, we don’t have to build and maintain a huge and expansive network infrastructure. So we’ll just earn money from advertisement, but it will not be specific for you, because we want your data to be yours, and we will accept to advertise only local products. Just need money for developers, lawyers, and advertisers huh? Just earn money from advertisement! A utopian marketplace that runs on ad revenue makes little sense to me. I would've liked to see the "decentralized system" part replaced with a boring "centralized system", and the boring "advertising revenue" replaced with something else.
- Kalium 8y ago
  One aspect that sticks out to me is that the application is imagined as decentralized, but the income as centralized.
  - nickdandakis 8y ago
    Pretty much every decentralized system has centralized components. You can't get away with 100% decentralization because we're not there yet. First example that comes to mind is the dat protocol (Beaker Browser) and hashbase[1], that is described as a "super peer" but is really a centralized server to keep your dat online when your local isn't running. But yes, you're right, the income is absolutely centralized. [1] https://hashbase.io https://hashbase.io
    - Kalium 8y ago
      Is it possible that you and I may be operating under different definitions of what it means for a system to be decentralized? To my mind, email is a 100% decentralized system that we have today. This, to my mind, suggests that we fully capable of designing, implementing, and widely deploying distributed systems. Can you help me understand where I have erred in this logic?
      - 8y ago
TheCapeGreek 8y ago
I don't particularly agree with the delivery suggestion. Basically a volunteer UberEATS style delivery with bicycles? To say this is ambitious is an understatement. Bicycles are not nearly as used as you'd think, and decentralized delivery with volunteers will probably raise the cost of delivery (effort/petrol/time) as well as no one would actually trust this. So, suggesting a local delivery service would be more ideal, but that again is a pretty lofty goal with the amount of local options. So I suspect this will end up querying a few well known delivery services if they are available in the customer's country, and give a rough estimate of that cost. Next, expecting the stores to bear the brunt of the store power also brings into question the technical knowledge of the store management. You'd need dedicated personnel for this since most people wouldn't know any of this. And granted, people who have the relevant knowledge to host and maintain the instance wouldn't be working in a store most likely anyway. All that being said I don't want to complain too much. I like the idea but as it has been submitted there are a lot of practical holes in it considering the "market" it would best serve (areas not already touched by long ecommerce giant fingers) not having the necessary knowledge and infrastructure. Personally I'd suggest taking a look at how other popular decentralized systems work and seeing how ecommerce would fit into that (mainly, Mastodon).
hardwaresofton 8y ago
OpenBazaar[0] already is this idea. I just checked the github post and one of the committers to openbazaar-go has left a nice lengthy comment explaining why/how[1]. Hopefully the people interested in Nile just put their support behind OpenBazaar instead. [0]: https://openbazaar.org/ https://openbazaar.org/ [1] https://github.com/open-source-ideas/open-source-ideas/issues/78#issuecomment-410764389 https://github.com/open-source-ideas/open-source-ideas/issue...
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  OpenBazaar is tied to cryptocurrency, which makes it a non-starter.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    It can't be that hard to change it to use whatever payment processor the seller wants, shouldn't it?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      Well, it's probably require a fork. Cryptocurrency is already tightly integrated with OpenBazaar. This also removes all of the platform's credibility in my eyes.
      - antidesitter 8y ago
        Why does it remove all of the platform’s credibility in your eyes?
        Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        Because it shows that they're more interested in riding the crypto hype wave than in solving real problems.
        antidesitter 8y ago
s73v3r_ 8y ago
The biggest issue with Amazon currently is counterfeit products. How is this planning on addressing that?
syntaxing 8y ago
I see a lot of people mentioning OpenBazaar here. I remember trying it out a year or two back when they had an early release. Has the OpenBazaar community grown? I haven't found anything I was interested in buying through it. I feel like the weakest link with stuff like Nile or OpenBazaar is that there is no good search engine out there for consumers to discover new products easily.
- SamPatt 8y ago
  I work on OpenBazaar. It has grown significantly over the past couple years. I'm mobile and don't have the stats in front of me but I do know that the network has been used by more than 55k people since last November when the 2.0 version launched. It's now built on IPFS so nodes are still accessible even when the store is offline. OpenBazaar.com launched as a read-only way to browse the network. A mobile version is nearing completion now. Check out OpenBazaar.org and download the new version, we're proud of how far it has come.
mittermayr 8y ago
I feel like people don't know the difference between "doesn't pay taxes" and "pays no tax" —– one is illegal, the other one is typically a success metric of accounting. (Disclaimer: I'm not advocating things like the double Irish w/dutch sandwich, or similar methods — while more or less legal — I personally agree of course how morally questionable tax-tricks can be to society, this is just to make sure we're clear that technically, most companies are a for profit and profit-maximizing operation)
gwbas1c 8y ago
"Amazon alternative" To what? AWS? S3?
- dolessdrugs 8y ago
  to the river
kire2345 8y ago
What is the incentive for the shops to scan and upload all products with correct description picture etc. this is a huge work, and just the access to a bigger market doesn't seem to be enough. Locafox in Berlin is pretty much trying to build a similar aggregator of local shops https://www.locafox.de/ https://www.locafox.de/ It doesn't seem to work too well which is why they diversified into selling digital cashier machines to local businesses instead.
dodyg 8y ago
Nice name :) Greetings from Cairo. My team is working on an hyperlocal e-commerce system that connects small stores with people in their neighborhoods. Delivery is limited to walking or bike distance performed by the vendors themselves. Cairo is full of small vendors in every street. Most of people living in high rises. You can get everything delivered already. At the first stage we will just save vendors from taking orders via the phone by hand by allowing them to receive orders on their phone. The next step is to create credit system that eliminate the wastes of vendors or customers when they don't have exact change.
- ohiovr 8y ago
  Hi! I posted a desire for something like this on the thread already! I just want to say I'm interested. I think it would be cool if people could share their stuff or sell their stuff to maybe a select group of people like family or extended family. The deal is it needs fulltext search and the ability to have privacy. This sort of thing would be great for situations like "I want to make ice cream. Should I buy an icecream maker for $99? Lets look at what my family has.. Oh great, Beth still has hers I'll message her to see if I can borrow it"
  - dodyg 8y ago
    Yeah. Right now I think people rely on WhatsApp groups for things like these.
kbumsik 8y ago
Does this need to be decentralized? Decentralized does not necessary mean fair. How a decentralized platform could sove the problems OP mentioned; paying taxes (by using a decentralized platform, really??) and profitable for economics? It is too naive to think decentralization simply can solve any social problems.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  'Democracy' does not necessary mean fair either. (Even in places where it isn't just a label.) Decentralization solves problems created by centralization. It replaces them with the problems created by decentralization. We're fairly certain now that centralization creates social problems. Decentralization eliminates big dictators in favor of petty dictators.
tanilama 8y ago
The description feels like a recipe for disaster.
debatem1 8y ago
Amazon is successful because it brings nearly everything a consumer wants within two days' easy reach. They are able to do so because they have an excellent logistical ground game, maybe a peerless one. Without challenging them on this you are not truly competing with Amazon. This is more like competing with instacart or similar. That's a reasonable market, but operationally is a very hard nut to crack. I don't think having volunteers on bikes is going to manage it.
arisAlexis 8y ago
thse projects are nice but there needs to be incentives
benlorenzetti 8y ago
An ironic name.
simple10 8y ago
Digital Town is working on a similar idea with a notable team and funding. Each city/town gets it's own domain or can use an existing one. It's a bit of a resurrection of 90's style search portals for the blockchain era. https://digitaltown.com/ https://digitaltown.com/
ohiovr 8y ago
I would be interested in a kind of federated marketplace, similar in structure to Nextcloud's federation. I would be responsible for my users, but other site owners can link to mine and we can expand our search for the goods we are interested in. We can just transact in cash just like a garage sale. It might be cool to have a private version of this so a family or extended family could share their stuff to save money and get more facetime.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Would this gave the option for one organization in a city to do the work for small stores? I can imagine stores might not have the resources to host a part of this, but maybe the municipality, a co-op, or a large company that wants to support the local economy could host it. This comes to mind because my employer wouldn't have a need for this since we make enterprise software, but we profess to support the local economy via hosting a farmer's market, using local food when possible in our cafeteria, encouraging local bookstores for reimbursable education materials, and even sponsoring the local public radio. We would have way more resources to host an instance than a corner shop that sells yarn.

wukerplank 8y ago
There are businesses built on top of local economies, e.g. Atalanda in Germany: https://atalanda.com/ https://atalanda.com/ (I'm not affiliated, but I know people who work there.) They partner up with local businesses for the goods and bike courier services for the delivery.
Aeolun 8y ago
I imagine it would be hosted (and funded and administrated) by the local business association, with tech support coming from a global foundation (same one developing the product).

chosenbreed 8y ago

Mmm...interesting idea...a bit Utopian...I'm not sure the world works that way...good luck to anyone investing their time, effort or other resources to get this going.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Much of what we take for granted in the modern world looked utopian before it was available.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  Not sure in which way e.g. the telephone or lightbulb looked utopian at the time. Most inventions had similar predecessors. Perhaps you're thinking of social inventions like the social security nets in western Europe - I'm not as good in their history.
Kagerjay 8y ago
Its great in theory practice not so much. Delivery is complicated on a logistical level, especially for larger items that bikers cannot move (e.g. things not like uberEats). You have to deal with dimensional weights, freight classes, fuel rates, concealed damaged, among other things

bovermyer 8y ago

The software piece of this is not the hard part. The social piece is. Admirable goal, but good luck getting wide enough adoption to achieve viability.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wild_preference 8y ago
This explains just about everything. Can’t remember all the times I’ve read some pompous HN comment “pah, I could build it” and then thought, “well, you’d be just 0.01% of the way there.” Nothing kills this delusion more than spending a year building something that you can’t seem to successfully market... multiple times. Then you realize there’s almost zero value in the technical part, and you can only chuckle at HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if that’s the crux of a new business.
- thidatysa 8y ago
  yet there would be nothing to market without the technical part so how can it have zero value ? maybe your marketing has zero value because you're doing it wrong
  - RussianCow 8y ago
    If you have good marketing/sales but terrible tech, you can still be incredibly successful. It's much harder to go the other way around.
    - ythn 8y ago
      And that's a darn shame. As a result we have markets saturated with snake oil while the good stuff (medicine) rots away in obscurity.
      - baq 8y ago

microcolonel 8y ago

So you're saying you're going to market your way of distributing products by insisting you "pay [more] taxes [than Amazon is obligated to]" and paying more for labour? What exactly should make the most expensive available retailer win purchases from Amazon? This is not a business plan, this is an economically illiterate wet fantasy for yuppies.

heavenlyblue 8y ago
So what's your fantasy?
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Irrelevant, that's what it is.
JackFr 8y ago
Or to put it another way, Amazon grew by taking margin from retailers and giving it back to customers. Amazon is successful not because they underpay employees or evade local sales taxes, but because the do a better job at retail than most retailers do. If you're inviting me to take part in an exercise to return margin to the retailers from the consumers, I'll politely decline participation in this farce.
- gonvaled 8y ago
  I am not sure how Amazon grew, but it is a fact that, nowadays, they are paying low wages, and that they are paying very little tax.
  - chosenbreed 8y ago
    To be fair though the corporate tax rates in the US are relatively high. I dare say anyone company in their position would do the same. Another point to mention is that I don't think they're as profitable as the other giants Apple, Google though their revenues are humongous...I hear some big corporations sitting on stockpiles of cash are waiting for the rate to come down before re-repatriating their profits :-)

Arzh 8y ago

This is / can be filled by craigslist or facebook marketplace.

waffle_ss 8y ago
No, this is for combining a local area's retail stores' inventory into a unified shopping interface, and a courier service for seamless delivery (e.g. so you don't have to visit stores x, y, z to complete pickup of a single order with items from disparate stores). Not individuals hawking their used junk.
- Arzh 8y ago
  Stores are already doing that on craigslist and facebook, this would just be hooking up a delivery service to it and you have it. Still seems like a pretty weak idea.
  - waffle_ss 8y ago
    I'd love to know how stores are synchronizing their entire shelf+backstock inventory to Craiglist or FB Marketplace given neither service even has an API (Craiglist allows bulk posting but that's useless if you can't bulk delete/update for availability) or even basic metadata like product quantity, UPC/EAN, etc. Ignoring that, the services you're talking about don't even do any kind of canonicalization or grouping of products like Amazon, so if you search for "Xbox" you're going to have to click through many pages of individual listings rather than having a unified product page displaying product details and specs from the manufacturer, consumer reviews, related product variants (e.g. color), etc. It's fine if you think the idea's weak but at least give the idea a fair shake before dismissing it.

usermac 8y ago

Amazon pays no taxes? Got this from the introduction.

jamroom 8y ago
Looks like they paid no US income taxes in 2017: https://www.seattlepi.com/business/tech/article/Amazon-paid-no-US-income-taxes-for-2017-12713961.php https://www.seattlepi.com/business/tech/article/Amazon-paid-...
- chosenbreed 8y ago
  I couldn't access that the article...are they saying that people who work for Amazon paid no income tax?
  - gonvaled 8y ago
    Which is related to Amazon paying taxes ... exactly how?
  - mandelbulb 8y ago
    https://outline.com/Kc2y7F https://outline.com/Kc2y7F
  - metamicah 8y ago
    No, it's corporate income tax, a direct tax imposed by the federal government on corporations. The rate can be 15% to 35% but there are so many deductions available that large companies like Amazon are often able to dodge it completely. For instance, the article mentions a $917 million deduction on stock options exercised by employees, which was probably the bulk of the deductions.
microcolonel 8y ago
Because, rightly, corporations do not pay tax on revenue, but on profit. The reason for this is that it should not cost more in taxes to buy something from a company which has secondary suppliers, than from a vertical company.

nudpiedo 8y ago

I am not sure whether the name "Nile" was picked because of the "Amazon" river or because Nile is a symbol of being the only major river flowing from south to north. The former would be mundane, the later a great metaphor.

jackbravo 8y ago
¿Por qué no los dos? :-p
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
Found your claim astonishing, so googled it. Looks like this is not true, at least the Ob river (3,650 km) and the Yenisei river (3,438 km) are major rivers flowing from South to North (Both top 10 rivers). So not sure where you did get that piece about the Nile from.
- test6554 8y ago
  It's a common misunderstanding. I've heard this "fun fact" mentioned in grade school.
- macintux 8y ago
  When I was in grade school, my science teacher told the class rivers couldn't flow north because, on a globe, north is up. Somehow pointing out the Nile wasn't conclusive evidence against it. Public education in America!
  - komali2 8y ago
    Ooooh is this a subthread for ranting about public education in a America? Cause I come from a family of teachers and I have WORDS! In a little school district in Texas, we can't use the word "adaptation" in our cellular biology section. Recent history textbooks use strange language around black slaves that seems to imply they were "workers," rather than, you know, slaves. Eh. I'll stop. I gave up on teaching ages ago, but my mom still gets drummed up in front of the principal at least monthly for some bullshit. Most recently because the students have a shared box of basic supplies at their little desk pods (scissors and markers), and some mom demanded her son be allowed to use his own supplies because she didn't want him using the "Communist supplies." Verbatim quote. She thought it would teach him the values of communism. Obviously my mom told her to fuck off in no uncertain terms, so stern meeting with the principal for July...

X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago

Openbazzar?

k1ns 8y ago
When I went to Google that, the first autocomplete was "openbazaar drugs".
- SamPatt 8y ago
  And?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
  If you make a decentralized marketplace don't be surprised when it's used for illegal goods.
- ofrzeta 8y ago
  That must be based on your search history :) I get completions in the following order: search, token, tor, github, 2.0, shops, blockhain

krmmalik 8y ago

Hi. What you're describing is a public market much like those that were in Andalus and also in use by the Greeks and for the reasons mentioned on the GitHub page this is what led to the prosperity of those societies. I have a unique set of skills when it comes to Strategy, process and narrative. Soft skills basically. I would love to get involved or at least have a chat with the founders of how I may be able to help. If the founders are reading this, please tell me how I can get on touch.

foxhop 8y ago

Hey there, I have the same vision. I drafted a blog post on Friday (just published it) discussing the first phase that I plan set in motion. I would like to partner up with you on this. Reference: https://russell.ballestrini.net/all-local-heros-need-a-gig-side-kick/ https://russell.ballestrini.net/all-local-heros-need-a-gig-s...

asimpletune 8y ago

Where are you based?

nickdandakis 8y ago

I love how oblivious (blissfully ignorant?) the "How will you earn money?" section is. > The application is decentralized so we just need money for the developers, the lawyers and the advertisers, we don’t have to build and maintain a huge and expansive network infrastructure. So we’ll just earn money from advertisement, but it will not be specific for you, because we want your data to be yours, and we will accept to advertise only local products. Just need money for developers, lawyers, and advertisers huh? Just earn money from advertisement! A utopian marketplace that runs on ad revenue makes little sense to me. I would've liked to see the "decentralized system" part replaced with a boring "centralized system", and the boring "advertising revenue" replaced with something else.

Kalium 8y ago
One aspect that sticks out to me is that the application is imagined as decentralized, but the income as centralized.
- nickdandakis 8y ago
  Pretty much every decentralized system has centralized components. You can't get away with 100% decentralization because we're not there yet. First example that comes to mind is the dat protocol (Beaker Browser) and hashbase[1], that is described as a "super peer" but is really a centralized server to keep your dat online when your local isn't running. But yes, you're right, the income is absolutely centralized. [1] https://hashbase.io https://hashbase.io
  - Kalium 8y ago
    Is it possible that you and I may be operating under different definitions of what it means for a system to be decentralized? To my mind, email is a 100% decentralized system that we have today. This, to my mind, suggests that we fully capable of designing, implementing, and widely deploying distributed systems. Can you help me understand where I have erred in this logic?
    - 8y ago

TheCapeGreek 8y ago

I don't particularly agree with the delivery suggestion. Basically a volunteer UberEATS style delivery with bicycles? To say this is ambitious is an understatement. Bicycles are not nearly as used as you'd think, and decentralized delivery with volunteers will probably raise the cost of delivery (effort/petrol/time) as well as no one would actually trust this. So, suggesting a local delivery service would be more ideal, but that again is a pretty lofty goal with the amount of local options. So I suspect this will end up querying a few well known delivery services if they are available in the customer's country, and give a rough estimate of that cost. Next, expecting the stores to bear the brunt of the store power also brings into question the technical knowledge of the store management. You'd need dedicated personnel for this since most people wouldn't know any of this. And granted, people who have the relevant knowledge to host and maintain the instance wouldn't be working in a store most likely anyway. All that being said I don't want to complain too much. I like the idea but as it has been submitted there are a lot of practical holes in it considering the "market" it would best serve (areas not already touched by long ecommerce giant fingers) not having the necessary knowledge and infrastructure. Personally I'd suggest taking a look at how other popular decentralized systems work and seeing how ecommerce would fit into that (mainly, Mastodon).

hardwaresofton 8y ago

OpenBazaar[0] already is this idea. I just checked the github post and one of the committers to openbazaar-go has left a nice lengthy comment explaining why/how[1]. Hopefully the people interested in Nile just put their support behind OpenBazaar instead. [0]: https://openbazaar.org/ https://openbazaar.org/ [1] https://github.com/open-source-ideas/open-source-ideas/issues/78#issuecomment-410764389 https://github.com/open-source-ideas/open-source-ideas/issue...

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
OpenBazaar is tied to cryptocurrency, which makes it a non-starter.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  It can't be that hard to change it to use whatever payment processor the seller wants, shouldn't it?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    Well, it's probably require a fork. Cryptocurrency is already tightly integrated with OpenBazaar. This also removes all of the platform's credibility in my eyes.
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      Why does it remove all of the platform’s credibility in your eyes?
      - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        Because it shows that they're more interested in riding the crypto hype wave than in solving real problems.
        antidesitter 8y ago

s73v3r_ 8y ago

The biggest issue with Amazon currently is counterfeit products. How is this planning on addressing that?

syntaxing 8y ago

I see a lot of people mentioning OpenBazaar here. I remember trying it out a year or two back when they had an early release. Has the OpenBazaar community grown? I haven't found anything I was interested in buying through it. I feel like the weakest link with stuff like Nile or OpenBazaar is that there is no good search engine out there for consumers to discover new products easily.

SamPatt 8y ago
I work on OpenBazaar. It has grown significantly over the past couple years. I'm mobile and don't have the stats in front of me but I do know that the network has been used by more than 55k people since last November when the 2.0 version launched. It's now built on IPFS so nodes are still accessible even when the store is offline. OpenBazaar.com launched as a read-only way to browse the network. A mobile version is nearing completion now. Check out OpenBazaar.org and download the new version, we're proud of how far it has come.

mittermayr 8y ago

I feel like people don't know the difference between "doesn't pay taxes" and "pays no tax" —– one is illegal, the other one is typically a success metric of accounting. (Disclaimer: I'm not advocating things like the double Irish w/dutch sandwich, or similar methods — while more or less legal — I personally agree of course how morally questionable tax-tricks can be to society, this is just to make sure we're clear that technically, most companies are a for profit and profit-maximizing operation)

gwbas1c 8y ago

"Amazon alternative" To what? AWS? S3?

dolessdrugs 8y ago
to the river

kire2345 8y ago

What is the incentive for the shops to scan and upload all products with correct description picture etc. this is a huge work, and just the access to a bigger market doesn't seem to be enough. Locafox in Berlin is pretty much trying to build a similar aggregator of local shops https://www.locafox.de/ https://www.locafox.de/ It doesn't seem to work too well which is why they diversified into selling digital cashier machines to local businesses instead.

dodyg 8y ago

Nice name :) Greetings from Cairo. My team is working on an hyperlocal e-commerce system that connects small stores with people in their neighborhoods. Delivery is limited to walking or bike distance performed by the vendors themselves. Cairo is full of small vendors in every street. Most of people living in high rises. You can get everything delivered already. At the first stage we will just save vendors from taking orders via the phone by hand by allowing them to receive orders on their phone. The next step is to create credit system that eliminate the wastes of vendors or customers when they don't have exact change.

ohiovr 8y ago
Hi! I posted a desire for something like this on the thread already! I just want to say I'm interested. I think it would be cool if people could share their stuff or sell their stuff to maybe a select group of people like family or extended family. The deal is it needs fulltext search and the ability to have privacy. This sort of thing would be great for situations like "I want to make ice cream. Should I buy an icecream maker for $99? Lets look at what my family has.. Oh great, Beth still has hers I'll message her to see if I can borrow it"
- dodyg 8y ago
  Yeah. Right now I think people rely on WhatsApp groups for things like these.

kbumsik 8y ago

Does this need to be decentralized? Decentralized does not necessary mean fair. How a decentralized platform could sove the problems OP mentioned; paying taxes (by using a decentralized platform, really??) and profitable for economics? It is too naive to think decentralization simply can solve any social problems.

8bitsrule 8y ago
'Democracy' does not necessary mean fair either. (Even in places where it isn't just a label.) Decentralization solves problems created by centralization. It replaces them with the problems created by decentralization. We're fairly certain now that centralization creates social problems. Decentralization eliminates big dictators in favor of petty dictators.

tanilama 8y ago

The description feels like a recipe for disaster.

debatem1 8y ago

Amazon is successful because it brings nearly everything a consumer wants within two days' easy reach. They are able to do so because they have an excellent logistical ground game, maybe a peerless one. Without challenging them on this you are not truly competing with Amazon. This is more like competing with instacart or similar. That's a reasonable market, but operationally is a very hard nut to crack. I don't think having volunteers on bikes is going to manage it.

arisAlexis 8y ago

thse projects are nice but there needs to be incentives

benlorenzetti 8y ago

An ironic name.

simple10 8y ago

Digital Town is working on a similar idea with a notable team and funding. Each city/town gets it's own domain or can use an existing one. It's a bit of a resurrection of 90's style search portals for the blockchain era. https://digitaltown.com/ https://digitaltown.com/

ohiovr 8y ago

I would be interested in a kind of federated marketplace, similar in structure to Nextcloud's federation. I would be responsible for my users, but other site owners can link to mine and we can expand our search for the goods we are interested in. We can just transact in cash just like a garage sale. It might be cool to have a private version of this so a family or extended family could share their stuff to save money and get more facetime.