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?