OpenBazaar is Open for Business | Hacker News Reader

OpenBazaar is Open for Business

blog.openbazaar.org

215 pointsgriffinmb36 comments

Congrats on the launch!

Looking forward to seeing how this social experiment/project plays out.

Can anybody summarize the benefits? Too lazy to install the software myself.

As I understand, there is an escrow. Is it trustless/multi-sig based? What about privacy/encryption? Can anybody be an escrow agent?

It's cheaper from what I understand.

Can the escrow agents determine their own fees?

Yes, looks like most of them charge between 0 and 2% Compare that to ebay at 10% + 3% to paypal.

I think in the long-term their plan is to be a fully decentralized marketplace, like a darknet market which can't be taken down (ofcourse they don't explicitly condone the sale of illegal goods).

One of the most impressive parts so far to me is the strong UX though. It feels a bit like browsing instagram+etsy.

Anybody can be an escrow agent, yes. Fees are customizeable.

It's like a darknet market (Silk Road, AlphaBay, etc) that can't be taken down by law enforcement. Or it's like a clearnet market (Ebay) that doesn't take a cut and works with bitcoin.

It looks like it uses multisig as a form of escrow [1], but the third party isn't in any way affiliated with openbazaar, just whoever the vendor and customer can agree to trust. It looks like users have to find a third party on their own, out-of-band [2]. I can see this working for small vendors, but I don't see how it would work with large vendors without the emergence of 1–3 large escrow services, which would diminish some of the benefits of decentralization.

This kind of multisig-based escrow will never be able to compete with Ebay. On Ebay, customers don't realize that they're paying Ebay to be a moderator because it's included in the price tag. On OpenBazaar they will be forced to pay attention to the escrow fee. I also fear that it will be impossible for escrow services to develop the necessary level of trust without being forced on vendors by the marketplace and still compete with the customer-favoring escrow that Ebay has.

It competes much better with darknet marketplaces, since it eliminates the possibility of sudden cash-outs or FBI raids on the scales that other markets have seen. They should accept that that's where they'll be successful and integrate some kind of anonymizing layer, probably tor, maybe i2p.

[1] https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/

[2] https://openbazaar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207548366

None of this is true. It's a web browser and server protocol for hosting web sites that can't be crawled by google. It is trivially censored. I have no idea who needs this.

I feel like this is partially correct. OB's peer-to-peer nature gives it the spirit of 'uncensorable,' in that no central authority can keep someone from making whatever listings they want. Though, individually, the shops are certainly censorship-prone since everything is clearnet.

A lot of people seem to think this is Bitcoin's 'killer app', which I don't agree with. I really can't see it pulling many legitimate users from established centralized companies. But I do think it's an interesting piece of work.

This is wrong, anyone using openbazaar for darknet reasons will be instantly caught because openbazaar does not support TOR or annonymity in any form.

The goal of the developers is simply a marketplace client, which seems misguided.

I'm sure you can use the tor http proxy like you can with nearly everything else.

Except it works on UDP and not TCP.. TOR does not work on UDP, there are things besides http that exist on the internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite

Your comment is unnecesarily presumptuous, but regardless...

I don't really understand why OpenBazaar would use UDP, and I can't seem to find any information about it, but it looks like they tell server operators to open up both a TCP and UDP port. I guess they might use it for DHT control messages? Their documentation site is down right now, so that's the best I got.

Well here ya go,

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server/issues/240

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server/issues/202

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server/issues/164

The server would need to be re-written for native support since it uses UDP, but I think it might be possible using a 3rd party like onioncat.

Replying here because the stupid max comment depth was reached on your deeper comment. You said:

> I guess they might use [UDP] for DHT control messages

And IIRC that's exactly what they use UDP for.

The subreddit had a lot of good info last I checked (a few months).

https://www.reddit.com/r/openbazaar

> Replying here because the stupid max comment depth was reached on your deeper comment

Note that there is no "max comment depth" on HN, and I don't know where this thought keeps coming from. There are a few reasons the "reply" link may not be shown:

- The comment was posted too recently, and you need to wait for the cooldown to expire. This is proportional to comment depth. It's said this is a flamewar prevention mechanism.

- The comment is too old.

Ah, ok. A quick google didn't show me why there was no reply link so I just assumed it was a depth thing. Thanks for the info.

It's p2p ebay with selling and transaction fees close to zero instead of the 13% you would have to kick back to ebay on a typical transaction.

Cached mirror:

https://archive.is/yOB5L

Thanks, the original link timed out for me.

Looks interesting. Is it essential to their goals that it be a separate app? I wonder why it's not just a website.

But then it wouldn't be decentralized

Extremely impressive UI. Great work team!

how does openbazaar make money? How will the investors recover money and make profit?

$1M in seed funding isn't that much.

At the moment, they're receiving donations [1], but it's entirely conceivable they're going for a similar business model to MySQL's original authors: selling support, consulting services, and training for their products.

[1] https://blockchain.info/address/3MXYUBLWNETa5HTewZp1xMTt7AW9...

I couldn't find this answer either. It's difficult to trust someone with large hosting / development / etc costs but no business model. It's not a charity. How do they "keep the lights on" with no fees?

Why would they have large hosting costs? They don't do anything except have a website where you can download the OpenBazaar software individual stores are self hosted.

The network effects of this will be pretty strong if this takes off. If they have a large captive audience of people with their wallets open, ads could be pretty effective/lucrative (and there's no adblocker if they own the browser).

Advertisement?

They are probably hoping the marketplace takes off then they will offer hosted stores to merchants who don't want to deal with setting up their own OpenBazaar node.

Looks interesting. Are my only options to use root password or compile it myself?

Panama papers -- <anger> OpenBazaar -- cool!

If you're trying to make a point it is lost on us, but if you elaborated I'd be interested.

AFAIK decentralised Bitcoin transactions are already illegal in the US if none of the parties to the transaction have a money transmitter license - correct me if I'm wrong.

You're COMPLETELY wrong... like extremely wrong. Bitcoin transactions between peers have always been legal.

Conversion of USD - Bitcoin over something like $5000/year needs a MSL

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