Hey everyone, I'm Sam and I work on the OpenBazaar project. Happy to answer questions if anyone has them. Looks like their site is down, here's a simple overview:<p><a href="https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/</a><p>We're getting close to launch and we'd love as many eyes on the code as possible.<p>Here's our backend, built in Python:<p><a href="https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server</a><p>And our client:<p><a href="https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Client" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Client</a><p>If you want to try it yourself I recommend you join our Slack and ask for help. We're building installers and packages now but I'm sure most people here could handle the manual installation process if they're curious. You can invite yourself to the Slack here:<p><a href="https://openbazaar-slackin-drwasho.herokuapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://openbazaar-slackin-drwasho.herokuapp.com/</a><p>Cheers!
Great comment explaining what OpenBazaar may become - <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3nlg5g/is_openbazaar_one_of_the_bitcoin_killer_apps/cvph3d3" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3nlg5g/is_openbaza...</a><p>"Interesting. This isn't just a decentralized marketplace, there seems to be something bigger going on. If you look closely at the screenshots, you will see there seems to be a social integration within it too. Notice there is the ability to follow stores. I'd imagine that would mean there will be a feed to consume all the new items and content from the stores you're following too. This isn't going to be the application you pop in to buy something once a month with Bitcoin, it's going to be a social platform with commerce layered in that you visit every day.<p>This seems like what every artist, social media star, author, photographer, musician, etc needs. Build a strong following, post an update of a new song, content or anything and people can pay to play/read it right away. New types of pay to read blogs will likely start to emerge in the market. New social media stars will emerge by creating edgy stores where people can pay them to do/draw/write/sing/play/cook/photograph/wear/eat certain things. A new social channel will come to life and the content and stores will be like something we've never seen on the internet before. It's going to be very very interesting people.<p>This is huge!"
bitcoin itself once had a market built in that was removed by satoshi in this changelist: <a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995ede03fb934edd67f1359ba8" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5253d1ab77fab1995e...</a>
Early on in 2009-2013 there was a lot of hype in the Bitcoin community over this. Lots of people (including myself) worked on Bitcoin marketplaces and most of them were marketed primarily to sellers because lots of Ebay sellers feel cheated by Ebay. But that is precisely the selling point of Ebay/Paypal. It's a buyer's market so Ebay/Paypal made the correct decision to be biased towards the buyers and that worked very well for them. My friends started buying on Ebay because everybody was assuring them that there was no risk to it. I took the leap as well precisely because of that reason.<p>I don't think escrow is a better preposition even if it is nominally cheaper (there is of course more risk involved, it takes longer and is more complicated, but it is also more private; not sure if it would be overall cheaper when considering all the above).<p>I'd be glad if someone finally managed to take on Ebay but I don't have high hopes. At most people have managed to fill in some niche where Ebay is doing a poor job, usually because it requires some specific knowledge of the merchandise being sold. Open Bazaar will probably follow suit and of course it will be that kind of merchandise.
Of course the 'money' in this is abstracting away the complexities of Open Bazaar with your own app since their example GUI is pretty confounding. For example create a designer clothing app that only lists other designer clothing listings (to not scare away customers who discover a bunch of heroin for sale on OB with the regular GUI), then sell the ranking they appear in your app, or in app ads as a small example.<p>I don't like the Moderator rating system though, seems too easy to game and has too many worthless stages 1-5. Bitcoin-OTC ratings are more clear. The rating "This is a scam avoid at all costs" opens the door for legal issues of people trying to sue the developers like when Ebay gave up on negative feedback due to too many lawsuits. Of course there is also issues of governments trying to shut down this completely due to weapons and narcotics undoubtedly being sold on OB in the future, I assume the creators have a plan for dealing with that inevitable gov harassment.<p>The creators/maintainers should also be careful where they travel, if they fly to say, China, Indonesia or Turkey for any reasons they could be arrested there and pushed through a kangaroo court.
If this is an open source distributed system without a central business entity deriving revenue from the market what's the reason venture capital is funding the group making it? Just a vested interest in Bitcoin growth/adoption?
What will prevent seller fraud? (The kind of fraud discussed here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10857478" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10857478</a> )<p>edit: The site's having trouble, but here's a link to the subreddit, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar</a>
This project is completely absurd. It started from an open-standard for darknet markets, and pivoted into bad magento clone that requires a special non-http browser and protocol to access.<p>The stores are trivially censored, and there's no efficiency here that will stand up to the preferences of non-libertarian consumers that have no problem with the so-called 'middle man' that is our current state of frictionless purchasing.
" and the always-active Slack room for the community is packed with about 1,200 users on their 41 channels, each of which is a topic-specific, skype-like chat room."<p>Chat rooms are skype-like now?<p>I suppose if you're talking about closed source.. :)