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Comment by SamPatt | Hacker News Reader

I believe in decentralization and the benefits of anti-fragility.

Having only a handful of companies in the world exerting enormous control over online commerce is dangerous. The amount of data they control is staggering, especially when combined with data collected from other centralized platforms (social media, the banking system, government surveillance).

I don't like needing to ask permission to use those platforms in order to engage in something as fundamental as commerce. Alternatives need to exist, and OpenBazaar is the alternative to the tightly monitored and controlled online marketplaces.

The world needs a protocol and network for trade that no one company or government controls. That's OpenBazaar.

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There is an alternative: (small) business. The world is filled with people who would love to setup a trading business. You might remember it, we called it "shops".

These corporations are so huge, because you buy stuff from them. That is the only reason. You bought and still buy stuff from them, because you preferred convenience and cheap stuff to integrity. Now they've grown so huge there is no way to control them. We will pay the price now, thanks.

We don't need another child-porn and weapons distribution channel.

i agree

I think the benefits of access to a nation-wide or world-wide market have been enormous and will become even more so in the future. Unfortunately we are realizing that the costs of this transition, if we maintain our current path, are grave. A decentralized approach like OpenBazaar mitigates or eliminates many of the negative side-effects brought on by our current, mega-corporation-dominated access model. With regard to small businesses, an OpenBazaar type system would enable small businesses to trade with the rest of the world (and their local community) on their own terms, without any anti-competitive BS, and without sacrificing profit to platform fees.

The question is: can a distributed system match the value Amazon's service provides to the consumer?

Sorry, I disagree.

Just because Amazon sucks, does not mean we need to retreat into full-on anarchy over this. Craigslist is also a marketplace and it isn't the behemoth Amazon is.

Also, Amazon provides a lot more than just a market-place. Everything from "inventory tracking to tax collection to credit card processing". These are no trivial features.

You could have started a regular, centralised, open market-place - by the community, for the community type of deal - and get the same benefits. Of course, selling "medicine" would be difficult.. but we all know that is not what this is about, right?

You said you want a network that no one company or government controls, but it sounds to me like what you actually built is a network for trade that no one controls.

What about a network that people could control, but not governments or corporations? That's a technical challenge if I ever saw one.

>what you actually built is a network for trade that no one controls

That's true in the same sense that no one controls the internet.

People can control their own portion of the network, they can ban peers and report listings to search engine providers. They can create a custom client that will only see certain types of listings.

Distributed networks aren't a new phenomenon, no one controls them either. If someone could control them they they wouldn't be distributed anymore.

There are ideas for governance systems (voting or other mechanisms), but if the network is permissionless then there's really no way to have an effective governance system (that I'm aware of).

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