From what I have read of OpenBazaar (I've not used it), Particl provides the following benefits:
- All sales are done using ring signatures and blinding (confidential transactions) so that both the sender, receiver and amounts are obfuscated in the transaction (
https://particl.news/particl-explained-private-transactions-44cb120d9cd). This means buyer and seller do not know who each other are.
- The market is self policing, so users can vote to remove immoral items, or to keep them. An item which receives enough negative votes is removed. Users can vote the balance of their wallets (without spending actual coins) to mark that many positive or negative votes against an item, if the threshold for negative votes minus positive votes is reached the item is removed.
- It attempts to be more decentralised by using MAD (mutually assured destruction) escrow, a form of decentralised escrow where both buyer and seller put extra funds in a transaction that only the buyer can unlock when satisfied with the transaction. At the moment this is 100% of the cost of an item but will be modifiable as the system moves out of early beta and seller IDs with a trust history are activated.
- Later versions will let you pay in any crypto you and the seller agree on. Not sure how they are going to implement this.
Disadvantages of Particl compared to OpenBazaar that I can see at the moment:
- You have to pay a small anti spam listing fee for items – currently c.0.02 USD
