The OpenBazaar team writes about their peer-to-peer marketplace that uses Bitcoin, covering reputation, moderators, dispute resolution and project funding.
HN commenters, including a project developer, link it to explain how escrow, moderator dispute resolution, and proof-of-burn reputation work in OpenBazaar.
It's like a darknet market (Silk Road, AlphaBay, etc) that can't be taken down by law enforcement. Or it's like a clearnet market (Ebay) that doesn't take a cut and works with bitcoin.
It looks like it uses multisig as a form of escrow [1], but the third party isn't in any way affiliated with openbazaar, just whoever the vendor and customer can agree to trust. It looks like users have to find a third party on their own, out-of-band [2]. I can see this working for small vendors, but I don't see how it would work with large vendors without the emergence of 1–3 large escrow services, which would diminish some of the benefits of decentralization.
This kind of multisig-based escrow will never be able to compete with Ebay. On Ebay, customers don't realize that they're paying Ebay to be a moderator because it's included in the price tag. On OpenBazaar they will be forced to pay attention to the escrow fee. I also fear that it will be impossible for escrow services to develop the necessary level of trust without being forced on vendors by the marketplace and still compete with the customer-favoring escrow that Ebay has.
It competes much better with darknet marketplaces, since it eliminates the possibility of sudden cash-outs or FBI raids on the scales that other markets have seen. They should accept that that's where they'll be successful and integrate some kind of anonymizing layer, probably tor, maybe i2p.
[1] https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/
[2]…
I'm not sure what you mean. I browse on HN a lot and post fairly frequently. I was surprised to see our project as the topic of the first comment on this article. It's not like I was seeking it out to pounce on a PR attempt.
Feel free to start your own project and compete; that would be great. We have a number of competitors and we're all driving the ecosystem forward.
"Your stated goal is to never turn a profit, ever."
I don't know where you got that idea. The company I work for, OB1, does certainly intend to make a profit at some point.
"You've also foregone any ICO attempt, which is free money. Why? Because you can't"
We could probably raise a lot of money an ICO, but we'd prefer not to. We even wrote about the reasons why: https://blog.openbazaar.org/why-openbazaar-token-doesnt-exist/
"because if people start using your project with your new Tor support, you'll be a co-conspirator in a drug distribution network."
No more so than Bram Cohen is a conspirator in a piracy network. And this kind of potential limitation in getting funding is exactly why ICOs exist.
"But you don't just come out and say this. You're not straightforward. It's fake idealism, and that quality more than any other is what motivates me to compete."
I don't understand what you think I'm not being straightforward about, but feel free to compete. I don't understand why you would want to given that you clearly think the idea is not very good for good luck.
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:
https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/
We're getting close to launch and we'd love as many eyes on the code as possible.
Here's our backend, built in Python:
https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server
And our client:
https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Client
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:
https://openbazaar-slackin-drwasho.herokuapp.com/
Cheers!
I believe there are times when it is favorable to "burn" ether or another cryptocurrency, i.e. lock up the money in an unowned account. For example, the decentralized market place OpenBazaar discusses proof-of-burn to establish a user's reputation (https://blog.openbazaar.org/proof-of-burn-and-reputation-pledges/). Burning coins allows a user to show they are invested in their reputation on the platform, without being forced to pay money to a central party.
According to the website there is a web of trust to establish reputation and you can set up voting pools whose members are those you trust. So it is based on buyer feedback.
https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/
https://gist.github.com/dionyziz/e3b296861175e0ebea4b
eBay is centralized moderation. Maybe a distributed p2p market-based moderation with reputation scores for moderators in addition to sellers, like openbazaar, is the solution: https://blog.openbazaar.org/how-moderators-and-dispute-resolution-work-in-openbazaar/