CoinMall has about 50 items for sale. OpenBazaar just passed 10,000 listings. Not really a comparison.

If you haven't tried OpenBazaar 2,0 yet (it only launched a week ago) then you need to check it out.

This was the version 1.0 of OpenBazaar, which had some fundamental limitations and wasn't very user-friendly.

The new 2.0 came out last week, and it's completely different. It uses IPFS so stores are always online, it's Tor-compatible, and it's much more stable and user-friendly. Definitely don't judge OpenBazaar until you've tried the new version:

https://www.openbazaar.org/download/

I work on it so if anyone has questions, let me know.

It's a good question. If you get your health advice primarily from the government, you're going to have a bad time...

But it's likely that many doctors do just that, either from incompetence or because they are somehow incentivized to do so.

As if the POTUS makes a huge difference in how events unfold. They aren't nearly as important as people claim. The US federal government is a massive organization made up of many smaller (though still huge) organizations that have competing priorities. They don't all listen to the executive in power, that's a farce.

In the DC area, you definitely get used to it, since it's as common a greeting as "hello." It's easy to segue into more interesting topics.

Still, I'm glad I left the area. Lots of boring people.

Appeal to authority isn't very convincing.

I don't know about $500,000 but certainly a random pedestrian who gets hit with pepper spray should be compensated? If you (assuming you aren't a cop) pepper sprayed someone randomly, you'd definitely be paying them damages.

One man isn't responsible for this. Destruction on this scale needs much more than one man. Everyone down the line is equally responsible as the one giving the order.

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

There doesn't appear to be any code here, where is the code viewable online?

https://bitbucket.org/blackyblack/freemarket/src

Can people open issues, or make a fork, or submit pull requests to the NXT FreeMarket project?

Yes, I was pointing out why that isn't such a problem.

Blockchains are obviously awesome for many things, but we decided not to use the blockchain for storing information about product listings. Listings (or on our platform, Ricardian contracts) need to be able to change and be signed by multiple parties in a chain of commerce in order to provide an immutable record of trade. This wouldn't be able to be done quickly, at scale, with a blockchain.

If the only objection to running a peer to peer network is anonymity, there are many way to address this. First, you can join a peer to peer network and be anonymous; I2P, Freenet, Bittorrent and others have shown this. But more importantly, if you don't want to run a node for anonymity reasons, you won't have to. Services will exist that let you log into their node and conduct your business.

I looked for the NXT FreeMarket repository to see how they're dealing with problems like spamming the blockchain, reputation, escrow, multisig (does it use that?) price fluctuations, etc. I couldn't find it, is it open source? Can the community see how this product has been made?

I don't mean to dump on their product, I think we want as much competition in this space as possible. But creating a decentralized marketplace that is user friendly is very, very hard. We've had people using OpenBazaar for buying and selling real goods since August, but we still haven't gotten it to the point where we're calling it ready, and probably won't be for several more months.

Hey folks, Sam Patterson here, I'm the operations lead on the OpenBazaar team. There's been a few misconceptions about OpenBazaar in this thread I'd like to clear up, and I'm happy to answer questions.

On the node issue: Yes, you need to either run a node yourself or connect to someone running a node in order to see the network. Right now, there aren't third party services for you to connect to through the web. However, this will undoubtedly occur at some point, and so users who don't care about decentralization will connect to a "gateway node" to conduct business, and people who don't trust third parties will run their own.

Also, running a node isn't like running a server. It's a small program that you can easily run on your own computer, easier than running a full Bitcoin node. It's very similar to a bittorrent client.

It's been suggested several times that OpenBazaar doesn't have code out yet. That's inaccurate, we're actually on our third beta release now. You can read more (and find the Windows version) here:

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

We're not claiming this is ready for real trade (though many items have been bought and sold on it) but if you check out our GitHub (on develop branch) you'll see that we have one of the most active projects in the entire Bitcoin ecosystem:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/tree/develop

We're excited about what has been built so far, and the wonderful support we've gotten from the community. We hope that by Spring 2015 we've have a platform that the Bitcoin community will be able to fully embrace as the primary way to conduct business within the Bitcoin economy.

Oh, and to answer the original question of the thread: No, there's no way to invest in OpenBazaar. This is an open source project to unleash free trade on the world, it's not a way to get rich for the devs. No fees like other platforms, no need to be tied to a single altcoin like other platforms.

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.