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With the takedown of free, albeit hidden, marketplaces which promote voluntary participation, free market competition and quality products and services by men in uniform vested with the "authority" to enact arbitrary "laws" passed down by corrupt, outdated and obsolete goverments, it is the time for us to give our full support to the establishment and development of decentralized marketplaces.

(That sounds so cryptoanarchist that I am creeping myself out.  :D )


But seriously, time for us to really take serious time, effort and funding to help OpenBazaar be successful.

You can contribute to the code by going to their GitHub page:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar (https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar)

You can Help fund their Tip4Commit:

http://tip4commit.com/projects/728 (http://tip4commit.com/projects/728)

And you can donate directly to the project's wallet:

BTC:   3MXYUBLWNETa5HTewZp1xMTt7AW9kbFNqs

And you can set up your own OB node using the steps from the wiki! :

https://blog.openbazaar.org/openbazaar-beta-1-0-tutorial/ (https://blog.openbazaar.org/openbazaar-beta-1-0-tutorial/)

Hope you guys have fun shopping and may all your stores be successful!!!

^ _ ^

good suggestion, but users should test with Beta 2.0

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar

With Beta 3 coming out any day now that will work on windows too!

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/2kwww2/ann_beta_30_launch_delayed_to_release_windows/


Great, help us make it better.

Interesting concept

iam watching the development since the start. exciting software  :)

I am waiting to the windows release
I have been watching the project and I am looking forward to testing it!

Yep - me too.

I think it could be a game changer.

There'll be bumps in the road.

But I do believe it will happen.

Testify!!!

Hey, I'd love to - and given a Windows or OSX client I will definitely be putting up some stuff to sell - and browsing stuff to buy - and telling everyone I know about it. Trust me on that one.

But TBH I'm not such a "techy" that I can compile dependencies etc on linux  :(

I am Jo Average.

I will let you know when you have a winner  :D

Why couldn't one buy shares in this? Such as freemarket did. Would have been win win

The Ubuntu/OSX build is actually up for beta testing!!!

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/wiki/Build-Instructions (https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/wiki/Build-Instructions)

And just bear with it for a little more, once beta-3 is out, the windows client will released, including a more intuitive user interface and overall easier time of using the platform

How many people enjoy the opportunity to commit at https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar and who are they ?

This is an open source project where there is no central company or controlling group. Selling shares in a company would completely undermine the project and add unnecessary attack vectors.  

Yes - and that's why it's beautiful.

ps. looking into the OSX release

They should have kept the original name Dark Market. Changing the name to appease oppressive governments is weak.. :-\

I dont agree with the name change as well, but I have to say that it would really make the entire development process only the more controversial than it has to be, which would impede development, and therefore, be less beneficial for the rest of us. :(

DarkMarket sounded so cool.....

OpenBrazaar is actually going to be 100% decentralized so there will be no central profits, meaning that there will be no shares to sell.

If this is going to be a good idea is something to be seen

DarkMarket could be mistaken as DarkCoin's supposed decentralized market baked into the client (maybe it's out by now), which I think they called OneMarket.

I was able to meet someone from the OpenBazaar team, and they're pretty awesome. It's FLOSS, so if someone'd like, they can go right ahead, take the current source and fork it, even incorporate for-profit mechanisms. It's really not a business -- it's not something where there's this formal structure of people who're always going to dictate how people use the fruits of their labor, and that's a pretty damn cool and generous venture. Super-pleased with its progress and wish I had something meaningful to contribute.

windows in a day or so.
This release is way more stable than last month's release too :)

Awaiting Windows release. Tried running in VirtualPlayer with Ubuntu with port forwarding, etc. but could never connect to any merchants.

OpenBazaar is one of the most exciting project around. Can't wait to use it big time.

I was waiting for the drug threads to open
Since for some reason or other no one put any press articles on it on the forums (did just now) then checked my wired feed and was like oh this is Bitcoin news.

As I do not know much about Open Bazzar I read some wired comment guess and I'll go with this opinion

Flipp http://www.wired.com/2014/11/dark-web-seizures/

While OpenBazaar project indeed seems to be something great, and it really is.. the problem is that it can easily be destroyed by a single individual who with some hidden motive decides to screw it up.

Imagine if I for some reason don't like the OB project and I wish to open something similar and proft from it.

Let's say I have 10000 $ at disposal. I can simply make hundreds of accounts and "fuck" people over with Nash equilibrium. How? Well since both parties are forced to put some amount of money in a special account and in case something goes wrong both lose the money, I can simply "invest" my $10k and screw hundred of individuals over by screwing the deal on purpose. Since hundreds of individuals will lose both their products and safety money, they will be pissed off and sooner or later people won't trust this kind of sites.

That's not how it's going to work. There will be a reputation system combined with an optional decentralized escrow system using multi-sig.

Thanks was wondering about it
So its possible to have a lot of 0 rep accounts but they will just get scam ratings more less like the forum
After a while there will be trusted users, which will be used for transactions and dealings.

So if you don't agree, can't you just take the code and create a new implementation of it and call it whatever you want? My understanding was that is open source. That's one of the most exciting things imo. I'm imagining hundreds of these decentralized markets with some selling strictly legal goods and others selling anything. They'll also be adapted to accept many different alt-coins and each will evolve in it's own way. I'm also thinking when we get some real, proven anonymous coins we're going to see some 100x gains for early adopters of them!

Why? Do you mind giving any reasons for this statement?

(Just heard of OpenBazaar - I am curious, even if only from a technical standpoint)

! Really?! I'll put my Jewellery up on Open Bazaar if that's the case! Been waiting for the windows release for awhile now!

The concept is amazing.  The exact implementation right now is lacking a lot. 

That is just a matter of code though, so in the future it might be as clean as Ebay or Amazon (in appearance but not merchandise)

How long that takes is the difficult thing to know. I think it is a good year or two away from being a serious player.

Is it tied to bitcoin or does it use another currency? Or even one of the many crypto 2.0 platforms?

Sorry for being so clueless, just discovered it - is there a comprehensive technical explanation somewhere, or a whitepaper?

https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/

Thanks. Yay lazyness. ;)

Curius ;D

We got featured in Business Insider:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-next-major-dark-net-market--openbazaar--is-supposedly-untouchable-by-police-2014-11 (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-next-major-dark-net-market--openbazaar--is-supposedly-untouchable-by-police-2014-11)

Sam Patterson and Brian Hoffman explain that OpenBazaar is not SilkRoad 3.0 on steroids, not just so, but is much, much more as eCommerce decentralized.

yep im hoping to sell tons of stuff but im slightly concerned on # of buyers, i guess we will work that part out later on, too early.

There will also be a proof-of-burn system for people who want to build reputation faster by burning money tied to their reputation.

This is a really interesting program. I have sold on eBay and Amazon, had issues with both. Amazon was much better than eBay in terms of selling, but they had their issues. I've always hoped for something to come along that would be as easy for buyers to use as Amazon is, but that would also work out the problems I had with Amazon.

The idea of this is great, but I think it will have to be very easy for buyers to use, for it to be successful. I hope someone is going to be doing some usability testing [User Experience Design (UX) / Human Computer Interactions (HCI)] on it. Because if it can be easily usable for buyers and sellers (like an ability to link to images for products that would just show up for the buyers when searching), it could work out really well.

Another thing that would have to be worked out, would be trusting the 3rd parties with the money in between the buyer and seller. All it takes is one 3rd party to be in cahoots with a scammer, or for them to just break bad after getting a lot of positive feedback. The thing eBay and Amazon have is that they protect the buyers (to an extreme they shouldn't sometimes, but I digress), but it helps to make buyers feel safe and bring them into the marketplace.

I guess 3rd parties will be in competition to provide the very best services and cover to the buyers, who knows what that could mean....

go openbazaar go :)

Open bazaar is the future. I dont support illegal activity, but with open bazaar  it will decentralize shopping. which is both bad and good. It will have bad actors  but the majority will be good, no one person will be in charge, so bad governments will have to go after each individual actor and  not just one person.

So, watch out for this place as It is absolutely the future in e-commerce. great competition for Ebay and amazon, thats for sure..

What makes this even better is the fact that OpenBazaar is not merely a platform for eCommerce, but an entire protocol on which other platforms could build upon!

What kind of platforms?

One of the cool things about FLOSS is you can do anything with it - similar to what we see with how Bitcoin's led to all these different altcoins, but where the "altcoins" can change things around to add major differences in functionality (rather than just, say, changing the mining algorithm and adding bonus blocks)! What it is may not be what it becomes, and some people may wish to try integrating some form of centralization. Personally, I'd love to see a large market of forks (there're already some forks), including experiments introducing centralization so long as they're open-source. Some kind of curator system (maybe the dev simply hard-codes "curator-tagged" pubkeys into the client who're the only ones allowed to list items and who collect a tiny %fee on each listing) which can exceed the level of verification eBay and Amazon do (almost none) would be awesome. I'm sure a great number of people would be willing to pay more not to have disputes resolved, but to participate in a market where disputes are far less likely due to "legitimacy verification" before the seller or product's allowed to be marketed. Open-source allows us to have many different stores implementing their own policies, resulting in a decentralized market where the best policies can thrive including both semi-decentralized and fully-decentralized implementations. I mean, the media's talking about this project like it's the next Silk Road, but I really don't think that's going to be the major takeaway from this project in a few years -- I think this is going to be talked about as the thing which finally eliminates the misery of eBay by pushing it off to the footnotes.

It makes me kind of glad we've had such a lame auction platform market since BitMit closed doors, because now everything's right for this (and resulting forks) to blitz the market and kick ass.

eBay is very similar to open bazaar in that it is somewhat decentralized in terms of who is selling items. There are so many seller-side scams on eBay that they need to institute horrible chargeback policies that allow for buyer-side scams

Awesome move by openbazaar:


https://blog.openbazaar.org/migration-of-our-project-funds-to-a-multisig-address/

(1) Developers can be malicious

Our threat model involves powerful agents at play. These can include malicious
governments who have the ability to issue secret warrants legally requiring
developers to take certain actions. We therefore follow a trust-but-verify
model in all our development process. As such, certain developers of the
project may in the future be legally required to perform actions that they do
not agree with, without the ability to communicate this fact to others. Through
multisig, we are requiring at least one more developer to perform a check on
financial decisions as a safety-net.

(2) Mistakes happen

We are human and often make mistakes. This can include lost wallet keys,
or destroyed laptops. Multisig will allow us to migrate our funds in case one
developer loses their keys.

We also sometimes make transactions that may be incorrect. A second pair of
eyes is good to make sure we don’t burn our funds or we don’t send them to the
wrong third party.

(3) Developers can become unavailable

Developers may become unavailable for various reasons such as accident or
death. We do not want to depend on one individual for all our funds. In case of
unavailability, multisig allows us to move our funds to a new address.

(4) Dictatorship is evil

We take team decisions with consensus. However, sometimes consensus cannot be
reached. We have never had this problem in our team yet, but it is bound to
happen in the future. In cases where consensus cannot be reached, an individual
developer should not have the power to act solely as a dictator and enforce
their opinion. Multisig requires at least one more party to consent. This acts
as a safety net.

(5) Transparency is good

We believe in a transparent development model. All our code is open source. We
interact with the community through public chat on IRC, on a public subreddit,
and in forums, all viewable by anyone. We plan features and submit bug reports
through GitHub issues, which are public. Anyone is able to criticize us through
these channels directly, even pseudonymously.

As of Beta 3, we are also making all all-hands developer video calls publicly
available through live streaming, and they are recorded for future reference.
We wish to be held accountable for our actions, and we invite the criticism of
the community.

In this direction, as we are funded through donations, we believe the public
should know exactly how much money we have and where and when exactly it is
spent. By publishing our multisig address, we submit our financial records to
public scrutiny.

Now, therefore, we are announcing the following:

(1) Ownership of public keys

Each of us controls one of the following public bitcoin keys. We are
providing bitcoin signatures as proof that we are in control of each.

Brian Hoffman:

Address: 12khSGHCvJoB7d5evWykvgeJVdYtSgAaxo
Uncompressed Pubkey:
04b3fae54a761c71d38df081cddb75b6306306d8e83338e9b748a02d4978ef48d356ec7fb4155bc 819767ed90d56a0dccab185b9bf3d52027cdc226b611ddd3985
Message: This is Brian and I own 12khSGHCvJoB7d5evWykvgeJVdYtSgAaxo
Signature:
IHb6uWPR1mGxl85YDfPN1trD6ybLeeH0FotTWrUr2W+lcDLiM5iXompDaMJxFg3MwFQpto5cInFrPyooFw+/60I=

Sam Patterson:

Address: 19xZbcnF9HB3ycfFJmQS5Gr7eJ7riJKrWc
Uncompressed Pubkey:
047AA4C9652BEB1A01B351CC212391168C11E192E25A88AF79A422C4F83CBC7ED0BB5632C87547C 45525167A8C814AFC29C7FFE44157547DC21B193AC714B4BA06
Message: This is Sam. I own 19xZbcnF9HB3ycfFJmQS5Gr7eJ7riJKrWc and will use
it for the OpenBazaar multisignature fund.
Signature:
IIKNFBcUu9OQ/L+bv/liAMMPBJHC70Y9bpzUsscW7C3FloC7uw5QH1UJUdN1AR50kuIAikB9mZkvZKcTGvDzDYk=

Washington Sanchez:

Address: 19fQbq6egzREyDSt8R1zGPAFoR1THWSV4g
Uncompressed Pubic Key:
0420b86afc794ec3307bcf3becc94b30f672a17483581dd703a37956f60ba89cf77bc349fe7d988 9f7ed609b14bc397fc4ae0196c8325e6acc4d2e95aceca4d207
Message: This is Washington, confirming that I own this address.
Signature:
Gx9lga0zuYcJk8dhXq3Wb0Nsy5tXohJusUoIw7pm9ZytrGC6wD8zfwS4K4f+sRqdWE2s9kyv9Wd5q0Fl//HY1AE=

Dionysis Zindros:

Address: 1HA6tFUGQrzrwGDDVp9dHivNRyhuT37dCh
Uncompressed Public Key:
046ca17a66be50dc0d0093d3ebbefb74ffbd69fae577dfa329f67444f3f99913708efa5f51ca27f d0509af26245c9d5526b620cb9d90ca9a4a0ef2e3e2fe0e2bb8
Message: This is Dionysis Zindros, confirming that I own this address.
Signature:
HI9Bc8o/pyKmowG9cRL47Zt4ylYIJOxQnvSB4AF7FaNCHVz+hA6jowsDppAIKwLX9FMrxBqiGnhgpc/68G2t+uM=

We invite the public to verify our signatures above.

(2) Multisig address migration

We are designating the following 2-of-4 multisig address for the storage of
OpenBazaar funds:

3MXYUBLWNETa5HTewZp1xMTt7AW9kbFNqs
https://blockchain.info/address/3MXYUBLWNETa5HTewZp1xMTt7AW9kbFNqs
The address is constructed with the above 4 public keys. We invite the public
to check that the multisig address is a 2-of-4 address and that it is
constructed using the above 4 public keys. For verification purposes, the
bitcoin script is given below:

524104b3fae54a761c71d38df081cddb75b6306306d8e83338e9b748a02d4978ef48d356ec7fb41 55bc819767ed90d56a0dccab185b9bf3d52027cdc226b611ddd398541047aa4c9652beb1a01b351 cc212391168c11e192e25a88af79a422c4f83cbc7ed0bb5632c87547c45525167a8c814afc29c7f fe44157547dc21b193ac714b4ba06410420b86afc794ec3307bcf3becc94b30f672a17483581dd7 03a37956f60ba89cf77bc349fe7d9889f7ed609b14bc397fc4ae0196c8325e6acc4d2e95aceca4d 20741046ca17a66be50dc0d0093d3ebbefb74ffbd69fae577dfa329f67444f3f99913708efa5f51 ca27fd0509af26245c9d5526b620cb9d90ca9a4a0ef2e3e2fe0e2bb854ae

(3) Mandatory transparency

We have transfered all our funds to the multisig address and published it
to be used for donations. While we still have access to our old donations
address for donations coming from people who have stored it, we will be
using the new address for all donation purposes from now on. Any funds
donated to the old address will be immediately transfered to the multisig
address.

We will make all our organizational payments directly from our multisig
address. We vow to publish the following information for every transaction
originating from our project multisig address from now on:

    The recipient bitcoin address
    The date of the transaction
    The recipient actual name or company name
    The reason for the expenses

In case of conversion to fiat currency, we will state the above data for the
recipient of the converted fiat currency.

We invite the public to verify our GPG signatures on the above announcement.

Brian Hofmann, Project Lead
Sam Patterson, Operations Lead
Washington Sanchez, Research Lead
Dionysis Zindros, Trust & Identity Developer

Bravo to the dev team!!!  *applauds*

 :D

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar

Go get Beta 3 (Tabriz) now!

FYI - Still no Windows installer.
Build Instructions-
https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/wiki/Build-Instructions

I don't think a "secret warrant" would generally force a dev to give up control of funds held by the project. A more likely scenario is that the secret warrant would force a dev to make some kind of "back door" to the protocol.

While I do agree with them using multisig addresses, I don't think their use is related to the potential for the devs receiving secret wannants

We are trying to skip that step and go straight to eCommerce 2.0 with the silk road being only a store within the marketplace.

Been playing with OB last few weeks.  Can only get a handful of merchants to load. :(

Probably not. If they become a place that markets themselves to people trying to buy and sell illegal items then law enforcement will attempt to target both buyers and sellers on Open Bazaar which will harm it's potential for growth

Don't use Open Bazaar for anything the 5 Eyes Alliance law enforcement would be interested in.

For starters, it's not even designed for Tor use so somebody forked it to bolt this option on. Who knows what kind of data is leaking to identify you since it was never designed for that level of anonymity. Second, you run your own little server which means it will be that much easier to discover who you are: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-November/007731.html so instead of simply demasking hosts they can now find users too.

It's also alpha, experimental software much like how Tor is still considered experimental software. Open Bazaar has a ton of other uses that aren't illegal to streamline trade between countries and will be an excellent platform for that. Something completely different has to be written to avoid 5 Eyes Alliance law enforcement, like delayed traffic much like how Adam Langley's Pond messaging system works. Simply bolting on some Tor support and firing up your home desktop to trade kilos of cocaine is not a good idea.

You should also watch this first before even thinking about using OB to become the scarface of the internet to see how open source projects can be sabotaged https://youtu.be/3jQoAYRKqhg

+1 on this.

Open Bazaar is still in it's very early stages and it's security is far from air tight. Although it is open source, the protocol has not had enough time to be sufficiently tested. Also the fact that it was not designed for tor/anonymity means that you could potentially be purchasing from an undercover law enforcement officer who can confirm that it was someone from your IP address that ordered something illegal

No one under the project is advocating its use right now even for legal items. It is purely to be tested right now as clearly repeated.

Here is the future roadmap:

Beta 4.0 (November 30)

    UI and UX overhaul (Mike's changes)
    Reputation network (WoT)
    Reviews
    Tor integration
    Instant messaging integrated #192
    Login and password protection
    Search improvements
    Ecommerce tools (import products from other platforms, integrate with commerce tools)
    Private contracts / Private stores
    Add donation option (Tips to notary and/or dev team)

Future releases

    Simple installation on all major OS
    More Contract types
    Detailed arbitration system
    Support for auctions

Do you guys have anything you'd like to say about the Tor fork?

OpenBazaar is cool but is not good enough.

So it begins!

https://blog.openbazaar.org/beta-3-0-tabriz-is-released/

 ;D

It's early days. Come back in 6 months.

OB is going to change everything IMHO .

It will likely take longer then 6 months to work out all the kinks. It also needs to get over the "hump" of being able to figure out who people can trust and the likely large amount of scams

Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen.

I keep trying to explain the implications of OB to my non-tech friends but they can't get their heads round it. Hoping it's a bit more noob friendly when it gets officially released.

The Windows binary is now available for beta-testing!!!

https://openbazaar.org/downloads/openbazaar-beta-3.0.zip (https://openbazaar.org/downloads/openbazaar-beta-3.0.zip)

I downloaded that and installed it fine but is anyone else having problems with finding merchants? I only have 1 up on mine and can't search for any.

you may want to check if you have port forwarding and UPnP enabled on your machine.

You can check it here:
https://tools.bizarre.company/port-check/ (https://tools.bizarre.company/port-check/)

Thanks! That seems to be the issue, I'll see if I can get that fixed.

You need to install gpg4win first for windows:
http://www.gpg4win.org/download.html


Yes, it is for testing only now --

https://blog.openbazaar.org/openbazaar-beta-1-0-tutorial/

I'll wait till it goes fully live before I try it out. I am very interested to see how it works, though. Will there just be one Open Bazarr or can anyone make their own. What I want to know is will there be one for like ebay-style goods, then ones for ilegal blackmarket drugs etc.

Most likely, there will only be one big network with everyone's listings listed on the different stores, but you will have the option to "filter out" the illicit stuff from your search results.

When does it actually go live? I think this needs to become operational as soon as possible. It's going to be an interesting experiment but one that is badly needed due to the nature of the free market. I'm also interested how they will deal with items that really shouldn't be on there like the worst kind of stuff.

OB is a great project imo. Its gonna be interesting where btc acceptance by the general public will be, by the time OB is ready to launch and then see how big of an impact OB will have, and how fast.

For me it's too risky due too escrow/judge stuff :P

Have gpg4win, it does not find it anyway. Any logs that could help you? I will get a fresh machine in a few days for linux anyway so Im not that much into fixing it, I just wanted to let it be known that there apparently are problems.

The full release will be rolled out by early 2015. They will not have any ability to censor any of the listings that will be posted on the network, even though they dont intend for OB to be used for illicit goods

Just found this thread, and watching  ... interesting  ;)

me too  8)

It has been "live" (although in alpha stages) for a few months now. Up until very recently it was only available to people who have a mac (this has now expanded into windows).

Been trying to access OpenBazaar for weeks using Windows/Virtual Player/Ubuntu with no success.
Am finally seeing 80 stores!
If you only see 1 or 2 two stores you are probably not connected.
This link may help:

http://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/2ltdf7/thank_so_much_guys_beta_30_windows_im_a_happy/

I don't get where to put that command line...

type the following into notepad:

start openbazaar.exe -j --disable-stun-check --server-ip XX.XXX.XX.XXX



where XX.XXX.XX.XXX is your IP address
then rename the txt file as a .bat file and place this file in the same folder as openbazaar.exe
create a shortcut to this bat file and place it on your desktop

I got mine running and it loads 40+ merchants, but when I click on one it just says "loading merchant" indefinitely now.

When run it and open my router upnp port forwarding it lists ports other than the recommend "12345", which I find strange. Then when I add manually add port 12345 it still doesn't work, so I dunno.

From what I can tell only a few merchants have products listed.
The rest are just tests.

Wut?
We've had linux running for months. Mac and windows installers are a recent addition.

Items that 'really shouldn't be on there' will be on there since your opinion about that won't matter. You will be free to not look at them though.
The current version will be susceptible to law enforcement 'opinion', but that won't be the case forever.

OpenBazar is not really that anonymous. So, if I had illegal stuff to sell, I wouldn't do it there.
Sorry, but it is just BS, that so many people think: "Oh, it's something new, it must be just for illegal stuff, because they could use XYZ for legal stuff"
People don't want to use Ebay anymore. People want as less central authorities as possible. So, P2P-Networks are spreading everywhere. That doesn't mean, this networks are outside of legal jurisdiction.

Agreed, it seems quite simple for the FBI to set up sting operations on OpenBazar. They set up a fake store front, sell fake drugs, and wait for you to pick them up at your house. They only need to do this a few times, perhaps only pretend they are doing it, for it to instill doubt in people.

Surprised drug trade is even being talked about, still.

The case for OB is really, really clear. Go here (http://www.newlifeauctions.com/calc.html), think about some things around your house, maybe something you make for a hobby or business, and see what Paypal/eBay'd charge you.

Just to throw out some examples (fixed price auction, no add-ons) for the exceptionally lazy:
$6.99 jams & jellies business = 21.46% fee per individual unit, 14.33% per six-pack
$10 Playstation code = 18.9% fee per unit, 14.1% per $50 card
Fujifilm "Instant Minis" = 16.12% fee per 20-pack, 14.34% per 50-pack.


Until you start selling items over $3500 each, the fee is >10%. Is eBay really providing enough service to justify 10%, much less 14-22%? Absolutely not, unless you count their customer acquisition costs, which is really just a fee to raise barrier to entry for better products; feeding the beast.

Let's look at two widget businesses.

Jim's Widgets sells 500 units of CheapWidget each month @ $5.99 each.
Bill's Widgets sells 250 units of PremiumWidget each month @ $25.99 each.

On eBay, Jim would be losing out on $685 in revenue from his $2995 potential. Bill would be losing out on $987.50 revenue from $6497.50 potential. Those are pretty massive losses. Medicare/SS taxes don't even come close to that %. OTOH, OB charges nothing; zero; 0%; $0.00; BTC0.00000000.


It seems completely reasonable for people selling to give a 2% donation of revenues to the developers, and 2% to a dedicated customer acquisitions NFP which literally just spends money advertising OB. This would still be a %fee lower than eBay charges on $20,000 items. On, say, $20, this is practically robbing the OB team compared to current solutions. What OB lacks (like pretty much all FLOSS software) is a good way of making donations painless and fair on the user's part. Right now, you can't just say, "oh, I want to donate 2% of all sales to Jim, 2% to Bill," right? Same problem Core and Armory have and why developers are now answering to higher powers, which, while it may not necessarily turn out bad, is clearly inferior to consistent decentralized donations.

I got up to 370 stores last night.. non loaded :(

OpenBazaar is a really exciting concept for me for a couple of reasons. I'm really sick of sites like ebay's fees, and I also think people should be able to safely buy drugs if they so wish.

When is it going to launch at a full scale? It would be great to have an ebay like place for cryptoworld.

http://bitcoinful.com/post/102357297262/an-interview-with-sam-patterson-operations-lead


Can't wait  8)

The way OB was designed was to prevent the identities of others from being able to be discovered by law enforcement (or any other central agency/authority) in an efficient way. This point is that it is supposedly more safe to buy and sell illegal items using OB.
eBay was really not designed to be used to sell these kinds of low value items on it, although many people do in order to increase their potential number of buyers. If you were to include the cost of shipping items in a way that can be tracked (which would be necessary for both OB and eBay transactions as if this was not used then the buyer could always claim they did not receive their goods) then the total cost would be much higher. eBay was really designed to sell higher end type goods that would sell for several hundred dollars.

i haven't looked into OB that much, so a question:

did i understand it correct that your shop is only accessible (buy, browse listings etc.) as long as you leave your node/software running?

It's an awesome software and pretty nice ;D the creator of the platform is anyone on bitcointalk forums ?

Amir is somewhere and he was involved somehow I believe but not sure if he's still active.

Good enough for what? Sure, the beta releases are buggy as hell, but the new ideas of implementing multisig and arbiters for consumer protection seem  powerful. It will take a while, but I have high hopes for openbazaar and others like it

Your IP address would be visible without taking special precautions when you run an OB node, so it would actually help the Law Enforcement to pinpoint your location. At this point, OB is mainly for testing purposes only.

Dr Washo is, and hes attended a few meetups.

OB was recently "forked" to allow for the use of tor. Not only that but it is designed in a way so that the transaction would not be available to law enforcement unless it was a party to the transaction (either buyer, seller or "escrow"/"arbitrator")

eBay's fees are still well over 10% on $xxx items. The %fee doesn't really become reasonable unless you're selling $5k+ items.

I tried to poke the OB team into commenting specifically on the Tor fork, but I'm guessing it's going to leak, which is why Bitcoin+Tor combo also isn't generally considered safe/private (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6079.pdf).

I may be reading this incorrectly, however apparently ebay now charges 10% on the sales price plus shipping (http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html#totalamount). I would say this is a huge amount (although the criminal complaint against the SR2 guy said that SR2 charged an average of 8% on sales so I guess that ebay can get the extra 2% for being a "legit" site

I have downloaded it for windows,but it require me to install another program
why is this happening?

Yes, install http://www.gpg4win.org/download.html first.

I just want a BS free craigslist/eBay for bitcoin to buy and sell on, however, the idea that using OB might "mark" you for attention is worrying. As the well informed are aware, it only requires faint traces of criminal suspicion to seize assets and block your banks accounts these days. So I'm wondering what this looks like from outside to LE, are "non-infringing" stores obvious enough that even a Judge with a bad hangover will toss out the warrant?  Seems rational to me that it would be tantamount to seizing your house because of a drug dealer on same street or in neighborhood, but LE is not known for it's rigid regard for rationality. This probably sounds like a wimpy cop out, but I can't deal with every little thing becoming an idealogical battle, just want shit that works.

That's a good concern. Maybe the creators of Open Bazaar could put up a notice (on the website and in the program), that it should not be used for buying or selling illegal goods or services, and that they don't approve of breaking the law. People might still try to do it, but it would be on the specific person for attempting to buy or sell then. Versus LE having an ability to go after the whole market because they see it as another silk road type site.

The developers of Open Bazaar don't earn money from it. So, I don't think, law enforcement can do anything about it.
Law enforcement also can't do anything against the developers of torrent-clients

I never looked at Silk Road (1 or 2); I take it that they did earn money from it?

Would be nice to see this take out ebay.

I'd imagine there will be lots of OpenBazaar forks in the future, some could provide legal services/goods like Ebay with the rest catering to the more 'illegal' trade (silkroad etc)

I was under the impression that people are generally encouraged to donate a percentage of each transaction to the devs of OB. While this is voluntary I would say that they would expect to receive donations rather frequently.

How is this name change any lamer than the play on "black market" for dark market? 

Anyway back to the big people table...

What are the hardware requirements for running a node?  I haven't found anywhere that mentions it (admittedly I haven't looked to much, just starting to look into OB).  I am currently running a P2Pool node for the bitcoin network and have room for another node for testing/dev. 

Looking forward to working with you guys :)

All users are nodes, the hardware requirements are too insignificant to even mention.

The change from Dark Market to Open Bazaar is exactly that - moving from pimple-faced teen table to big people table :)

I suggest checking out the IRC Channel for OpenBazaar if you have questions for the devs / founders.  Theyre on freenode - #openbazaar

-B-

I will head there directly and check it out thanks!

I would say that OB is much more complex then most dark markets due to it's decentralized nature. People will need to fend for themselves to be able to protect themselves from scams and may not be able to check for potential scams prior to participating in a transaction

To answer the "why", OB uses gpg4win to generate public and private keys. With linux you usually have those tools allready and it makes no sense to include this into OB.

Its the same tool one would use to encrypt mails.

Yes, like with P2Pool, I have always preferred to stick with Linux for this very same reason.  I will be implementing a Linux node behind a fairly robust firewall I designed a while back.  I wonder if I can route the node through tor and still be an effective node? 

Does anyone think the latest Dark Web Down incident is any indication of a flaw in tor?  I know there was some speculation on this a long time ago, given the fedly roots of the tor project. 

We ought not forget it was the feds who created the internet to begin with, so the only thing we can do to outpace them is outinnovate them.  To the drawing boards!

^coming soon...  8)

I thought there was a desire not to have shares?

Please verify any rumors with trusted sources and not troll accounts with one post:

https://openbazaar.org/
https://blog.openbazaar.org/
https://twitter.com/openbazaar

I've got a feeling OpenBazaar wont be the first or last decentralised market around. Loads of people will try create their own versions and I'm sure there will be a few to "invest " in, but I wouldn't bother.

OpenBazaar shares would ruin the whole point of it being open source and decentralised, if you want shares then get the OpenBazaar code and start your own company.

That's my thoughts on the matter

Well I'm not too sure how keen I am on the concept of "proof of burn" (...ing Bitcoins) for every store owner, repeatedly for the life of the Open Bazaar existence.

The creation of an OB token of some sort which costs money, would enable vendors to show good faith by spending that money to authenticate their store, without a constant, ever-burning destruction of Bitcoins.

You dont have to allow it to be traded. 

-B-

I too am thinking about that one.

Couldn't the same thing be accomplished by sending a transaction to Sean's Outpost or some other charity?

Or further dev/security/maintenance?

The main advantage of Proof of Burn is that, the value gets lost from bitcoin and gets added to the new token. It's also transparent.
And if you give it to sean's outpost, the bitcoin will return to the market place. So, only the value exchanges the hands, there is no money backing the token.

Although i do not wholeheartedly agree with Proof of Burn. We could lock bitcoin up.....

I'm sure people will do this. People are always greedy and will want to make money from this great idea. Hopefully the market will dictate which way these kind of marketplaces will go and how they will develop without centralised entities or people taking their cut.

Is OpenBazzar going to be completely without fees or will a small amount be distributed to the people who host or run it similarly like the bitcoin miners get a share?

No fees, besides any BTC miner fee or arbitration fee if there is a dispute.

This is expected, and in fact, is the reason the licence was changed from GPL to MIT recently.

There are no fees to use OB so any shares that would be sold would be worthless.

OB's only source of revenue is donations from the community, however such donations would almost certainly stop once shares are sold.

I think this is one of the best points of Open Bazaar. Sites like ebay and also black market sites such as Silk Road charged too much in fees and bonds etc.

The coin burn is worrying me also. Having a limited number of bitcoins = good idea.... having very limited number of bitcoins = not good idea.

How fast is this going to "unmine" them, if we posit that it becomes as successful, though not identical, to SR 1.0 ?

I know we've got some natural attrition due to mistakes accidents and carelessness, but if it munched as little as 5% a year, I would tend to think that that made bitcoin look like not having a long term future. (Until the last million or so left were never traded or spent and used purely as value store/reserve, at which point mining would be pointless, no tx, and shit would die.)

There is no limits to how many units we can create with further decimalization. The 21million cap only protects us against the theft of inflation. Even if 20 million BTC is burned we will be fine.

The act of burning coins is simply the act of giving the community a gift of deflation(increasing their spending power).

Things can be mathematically sound, but psychologically discomforting ;-)

Agreed, but luckily we can adapt by becoming used to other nomenclature like milibits and bits in the future.

Plz can you explain differenze between GPL and MIT license in a few words?
Thanks

GPL use in a project requires all code mods to be GPL/public. MIT doesn't.
There are exceptions, but basically that means a group could use OB in a commercial product without being required to contribute their whole project (or even the OB enhancements) to the public domain.

See? You're doing it already.
How can a millibit be bigger than a bit?
My head is still exploding...

No, not really. The act of burning coins is buying trust. The amount of coins that will (realistically) potentially be burned is much less then the amount of coins that are mined via the miners every day.

Yes, I understand the reason for open bazaar burning coins. I was merely suggesting what the economic effect of destroying bitcoins .

Hey everyone, Sam Patterson here from the OpenBazaar team.

We admittedly don't have a very good presence here in the forums, we are mostly in our /r/openbazaar subreddit or on IRC. So claims like the quote above should be treated very skeptically; this appears to be a scammer.

We aren't offering shares, or any investment of any kind. There are no fees for using OpenBazaar - that's one of the cores benefits of it - so it's unclear how anyone could get a return on investment. We do take donations, but aren't soliciting them, we don't really need them at this point. If we do, we'll do a proper crowdfunding campaign.

Happy to answer questions about OpenBazaar is anyone has them. We're really excited to see how much the community has supported us over the past few months, it's been a lot of work but very rewarding.

thanks for clearing that up.

do OpenBazaar have any solution for child pornography or terrorism funding?

Terrorists are much better funded with fiat currencies as they can function anonymously and have ways of better controlling their currency to support their efforts. Terrorism is inappropriately used to describe actions of opponents, lunatics, and small gangs when it should also be applied to states as well. The DEA and SWAT team attacking a family and stealing all of their assets for consuming a plant peacefully do qualify to be labeled terrorists as well. Thus supporting Bitcoin and OpenBazaar can lead to a reduction in terrorism as it makes their efforts futile and possibly lead to decriminalizing more drugs in the future.

Child Pornography, murders for hire, and terrorism all has to be handled with good old fashion investigations and sting operations. Frankly, I could care less if perverts are jerking off to underage cartoons or simulated pictures of children. I think its disgusting but it doesn't harm any children directly. If any real children are used we can investigate into it and track them down based on the photos themselves providing leads. We can investigate murders for hire by a sting operation where any bounty hunters are arrested or killed defensively as soon as they attack the bait.

I don't speak for OpenBazaar but I would hate to see an entire network shut down over a few psychopaths when the rest of the people using it are just using it for relatively innocent purposes in comparison, I'm sure the community will inform somebody if that kind of shit happens but a true free market should never be jeopardised because of the actions of a few.

If you've looked around I'm sure you realise that the media have a habit of painting us all as terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles when we're quite obviously not.

ok.

if so is not good for us because we can never see the source code....

if i understand well

no????

No, its completely open source and will remain so. The source code is on github.

He meant, that somebody could make a clone that isn't open source anymore, as far as he understood MIT-license.

Someone could clone the code and create a closed source version. There is nothing stopping that from happening with or without the license. TBH we wouldn't have enough funds to go and fight something like that if it did violate our license ATM. Our core project and reference implementation client will remain open source and this will not change. Our goal is to build a free and open protocol that can be used in open and/or closed projects. Users will have to be vigilant to root out bad forks or derivations or remain using the core team's software which can be audited and openly reviewed.

In terms of content on the network it's closer to an agnostic marketplace transport and facilitator than a content inspector and that is not under the purview of this project. If someone wants to step up and provide a plugin or extension to help end users filter their content that is viewable that is possible and we would of course view this as an outside interest. We're not aiming to support illegal behavior, rather we are deferring that responsibility to an outer layer rather than as part of the core protocol. Does that help?

Wow, The whole thread is a burst!! People here are talking about burning bitcoin and Openbazaar are not even doing any IPO...

Proof of burn isn't for an IPO with open bazaar,but a way to bolster the reputation of a merchant or arbitrator.

Read more about it here directly from the source:

https://blog.openbazaar.org/proof-of-burn-and-reputation-pledges/

https://blog.openbazaar.org/why-proof-of-burn/

UPDATE: added OB's mutisig wallet address to OP

No. Although things like terrorism funding is not really something that would likely take place on a platform like OB unless entities like ISIS were to sell stuff on OB and use the proceeds to finance themselves, however I think they could use many other marketplaces to accomplish this if what they are selling is not illegal.

I have seen a couple of teaser youtube videos advertising OB before the project was as far along as it is now and the videos were advertising that any buyer could use plausible deniability if the police were ever to intercept a package sent to them containing drugs. 

OpenBazaar is a great platform and i hope to see it develop into a fully decentralized and open platform for all to use. I think its time we stop using the governments internet and make our own one too :)

Particularly since the likes of Comcast et al have done a regulatory capture of the FCC and monopolise high speed access to it. Cut them out too, send them to the poorhouse.

Best initiative I've seen so far are Mesh networks, using routers. There was also a free "data hose" one way satellite internet idea in the works. Now for offloading lowest common denominator donkey work of fetching high traffic sites on, and putting all the interesting stuff across the mesh wifi, we might have something.

People may decide not to use it but it can't be shut down. It's a decentralized peer to peer network like Bitorrent and Bitcoin.

If there's going to be a Bitcoin killer app, I feel like this is going to be it. Does anybody know when this is going live?

What made you think so?

Early next year it should be safe to use.


https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/wiki/Development-Roadmap

Roadmap and Timeline
Beta 1.0 (August 31):

    Generation, signing, and verification of Ricardian Contracts.
    Generation, signing, and broadcasting of 2-of-3 multisig.
    Reputation Pledges, a proof-of-burn implementation for bootstrapping trust.
    Ability to back up database.
    GUI to manage these features.
    UPnP port mapping support.
    One-click .tar.gz backups of the database and keys.

Beta 2.0 (September 30):

    Multiple bug fixes.
    New feature: "Add Node" by entering Store GUID.
    New feature: Shutdown from within the web client. (Settings > Advanced)
    New feature: Web port is now randomized by default.
    New feature: Automatically opens preferred web browser by default on start.
    UX-Upgrade: stores on home page are now scrollable.
    Tests converted to formal unit tests, travis integration.
    Code reorganization, normalization, cleanup, refactors.
    Debian binary now lintian error and warning free.
    Compatibility and stability improvements in configure.sh
    Search improvements

Beta 3.0 (October 31):

    Emphasis on increasing unit testing coverage significantly
    More pricing options #123
    Direct transactions #121
    Add location to contract #104
    Edit contracts
    Block store
    Windows build
    Refund buyer
    Automated installation testing #630
    Improved notary selection
    Simple arbitration system
    NSFW tagging and search filter
    Namecoin integration
    Shipping address improvements #433
    Network stability improvements (fix zmq errors)

Beta 4.0 (November 30)

    UI and UX overhaul (Mike's changes)
    Reputation network (WoT)
    Reviews
    Tor integration
    Instant messaging integrated #192
    Login and password protection
    Search improvements
    Ecommerce tools (import products from other platforms, integrate with commerce tools)
    Private contracts / Private stores
    Add donation option (Tips to notary and/or dev team)

Future releases

    Simple installation on all major OS
    More Contract types
    Detailed arbitration system
    Support for auctions

there is no one killer app. bitcoin has so many use cases that it will have alot killer apps.

Killer app be like the first tank in WWI ...

Bitcoin be like bear cavalry, 50,000 strong.

It cannot be entirely shut down, but it can be effectively shut down in a number of ways. Adversaries could potentially paint anyone that uses OB as a criminal, making many people not want to use it; they could pull off a number of scams and scam attempts, making trading on OB inefficient and potentially expensive (from both wasting your time with scams and potentially actually getting scammed); or law enforcement can infiltrate the network and conduct a lot of controlled buys and controlled sells so anyone who attempts to conduct illegal activity on OB will likely get caught.   

Hope that the OpenBazzar will be a key in launch BTC rocket to the moon! ;D

You can say that again!

But its not just that, a decentralized marketplace is something that is needed in today's world, it simply needs to exist. Imagine being able to sell to your products to the world w/o having to worry about hefty fees levied by platform operators, or listing censorship, or being able to buy from anyone in the world at discount prices because of the reasons provided above, without having to get permission from anyone?

Its beautiful.

Said nearly everyone in the wall observing thread!

Short term bears get mauled by long term bulls and their horns.

BUMP!!!

If you really want to help OpenBazaar, help us make the tools to implement the OpenBazaar Market Protocol apart from the p2p network. This would allow users to create, sign, and verify the Ricardian contracts that OpenBazaar uses regardless of the network they are distributed on, as well as manage the multisig accounts. It's making online trade and multisig possible over any form of online communication. Read more about it here:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/issues/1091

This will help the project far more than donations. Please reach out to me if you want to help make this. sam@openbazaar.org

For prospective developers who want to contribute, here's some stuff  (http://redd.it/2os09l) you might want to sink you teeth into.