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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

According to https://www.openbazaar.org/about/

They founded a company, OB1, with a $1 million venture capital investment from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. [...] OB1 received a second round of investment for $3 million in the fall of 2016.

OK, so just to clarify, this is a for-profit project produced by a central party with no stated plan for monetization. That is IMHO dubious. Their website http://ob1.io/ includes a couple of hints as to how profits may be eventually sought: a search engine for Open Bazaar and a cloud based Open Bazaar store launching service. Then there is the fact a small cabal have probably premined all the easily obtainable coins (SYSPOOL, Give Me Coins, F2Pool), which means if the value goes up they profit handsomely.

Note that http://ob1.io/about.html lists some more investors: BlueYard Capital, Digital Currency Group and William Mougayar.

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OpenBazaar itself is not a for-profit project, and it predates the formation of the OB1 company by a year.

OB1 has a plan for monetization (I'm a co-founder!) but OpenBazaar itself is designed as a neutral trade protocol and network that doesn't rely on OB1 at all, other than the majority of developer power is provided by the company at the moment.

> OK, so just to clarify, this is a for-profit project produced by a central party with no stated plan for monetization. That is IMHO dubious.

For an early Bitcoin whale, a few million is negligible for a product that could bring crypto to the masses and dramatically increase the value of their crypto investment portfolio.

OpenBazaar is non-profit project built by multiple for-profit groups. Us at OB1 are just one group. https://duosear.ch and https://mubiz.com are two others.

https://duosear.ch = another search engine, no about page, domain registered to an individual, just over 1 year old.

https://mubiz.com = another search engine, very small French company

Sometimes VCs fund things they want to exist independently of whether they'll make a profit. $4M is spare change for a fund.

I'm not sure that's the case here, but "no obvious way to make money" isn't exclusionary when it comes to the VC funding model.

An added bonus is that once the software is written, it can continue to work without the involvement of OB1, even if they run out of money and disappear, and even if they turn rogue and start trying to extract fees from every transaction.

It's an open source, decentralised, peer-to-peer system. As long as the peers want to keep using it, they can keep using it.

Who's going to maintain the software? Open source projects abandoned by founding companies don't have a stellar track record.

Open source projects abandoned by founding companies have a better track record than SaaS projects abandoned by founding companies.

Anybody who is interested can maintain it. If it has a large number of people actively using it to conduct business on a daily basis, somebody will maintain it. If it's big enough that lack of maintenance would be a problem, it won't be a problem.

Most of us were working on OB for free before OB1. If OB1 were to fail I think many of us would continue to work on OB either at another OB-based company or just back on our own.

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