What uses do you see for this aside from illegal drugs, cybercrime, terrorism, child porn and human trafficking? Do you feel you're making the world a better place with this project?
There are some illegal drugs on the network. Thus far I haven't seen any evidence of the other stuff you've claimed.
Perhaps it's human nature that people will eventually abuse the technology in that way, but it doesn't mean the technology isn't valuable, and it doesn't mean that the benefits don't outweigh the costs.
This is obviously an age-old debate about new technology, but if we had the mindset that any technology that can be used for evil shouldn't be allowed to exist then we wouldn't have TCP/IP and HTTP and SMS and SMTP, etc.
https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-desktop/releases
But if you can't be bothered then there is a search engine as well:
Have you bought or sold anything online in the last week? Those things could probably be done on OpenBazaar.
> Have you bought or sold anything online in the last week? Those things could probably be done on OpenBazaar.
But will they? I don't think that's a fair summary of the criticism. There are already much more convenient alternatives for legally selling goods and services, using currency that's actually effectively currency, without using some command line tool to run a node. I think there are going to be three types of users: 1) people that are using it out mostly out of interest of the technology, 2) people to whom the platform is ideologically interesting i.e. anti-government types, libertarians, anti-corporate types etc., and 3) users that actually benefit from the anonymity and lack of censorship by selling illegal goods or completely avoiding taxes.
I wouldn't be surprised if the last category eventually grows much bigger than the former two. I only hope that it will be mostly illegal goods that don't harm really anyone, like cheap counterfeit consumer crap.
"Who would buy anything on eBay when there are already more convenient alternatives?" ?
I buy almost everything on eBay because of the convenience of having the same search system and user interface for every type of thing I want to buy. I'd love to get a similar user experience without having to trust eBay as the arbiter of every single transaction. For example you can't buy knvives on eBay, so when I want to buy a knife I have to go somewhere else. I bought a number plate for my car on eBay recently (old one was cracked), and it all went fine, but when I went to buy another I found the seller's account had been shut down by eBay, for unspecified reasons. On OpenBazaar that wouldn't be able to happen.
Not really. I don't know of any much more convenient ways to facilitate auctions that predates eBay. I'm too young, really, to say out of experience how things were before eBay, but personally I went directly from browsing second hand stores and newspaper classifieds to use the local eBay clone which afforded it the additional convenience of only listing local items, but that was eventually bought by eBay as well.
For the general consumer I don't think that trust in eBay or having to go someplace else to buy knives and license plates is enough of an inconvenience to outweigh the inconvenience of trusting your bitcoins to have roughly the same value the day after tomorrow, or having to run a daemon to access listings.
I don't think you're wrong or that you have misplaced your priorities somehow, but I think you'd belong in category 1 and/or 2, and for as long as those aren't representative of the broad public I think services like OpenBazaar will mostly be attractive to those operating in the legal grays and blacks, simply thinking in terms of who's got most to gain from anonymity, lack of governance and untraceable transactions despite their inconveniences.
But let's say it attracts some 10000 (+/- an order of magnitude) privacy-minded cryptoanarchists that are all there because they don't trust sites like eBay or can't find some categories of legitimate items there because of some of eBay's rules. The sheer breadth of items, buyers and sellers afforded by a much more generally convenient site like eBay or CL won't be available to them, and I think that's going to turn a lot of people off that aren't explicitly looking to buy items that are much harder to get elsewhere. Maybe they'll find their knives and license plates but it'll be switchblades and counterfeits respectively.
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Does OpenBazaar do this? Probably not.
Are all these people anonymous on IPFS?
Probably somewhat because they're behind VPNs or proxies, at least that's what I hope they do if they're offering things like above.
Will this stop law enforcement?
No, it will not: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/08/vpn_logs_helped_unm...
You should also be informed that DMCA is not relevant to over half of your links. Its target is copyright circumvention, not narcotics sales etc.
The individuals allegedly selling those possibly illegal things could receive legal actions like DMCA and narcotics laws, and even you might for linking to them. But I was not talking about those individuals, only the irony that you are at greater legal risk than the OpenBazaar developers.
History disproves your disingenuous comments.
The most important issue is that OpenBazaar is software and the other was a service based around a website.
Why do you comment so confidently and enthusiastically, when you apparently understand so little?