If they indeed have a solid plan behind it, yeah I tend to not throw monkey poo at them from the first step but I dislike tokens that start as crowdfunding when the business behind it is just an idea and they have zero real-life activity other that whitepapers and dreams.
Agree. Some work must be done before.
From my point of view, every token or coin that does the same thing as others with zero improvements or who's role can be taken over by one hundred other tokens is useless[...]
This again depends on what the token is meant to be exactly. If a token is a replacement for a loan or Kickstarter campaign, and not "the next bitcoin1!!!!" , then there can be multiple tokens of a single kind. In the case of small businesses (or single freelance artists, for example) it may however be better to try to crowdfund direct in Bitcoin or another established cryptocurrency (which will also mean less regulatory hassle).
The moment they start doing it for profit [...] it will start getting a lot less decentralized in my opinion. You will have a company running a free market but attaching other paid services to it, some that might even collide with the interest of the sellers there, I can smell amazon marketplace here, and no..just no
If it's done well it is possible - take Linux or even Bitcoin as examples where a for-profit company finances the development of a free, open source/P2P software solution without introducing hassle for the users (the Bitcoin Cash fanclub may disagree with that but I don't care
).
And as OpenBazaar is P2P and open source, if OB1 decided to introduce services colliding with the interests of the users/sellers, very likely a fork would appear and become more popular. So no, they would always have an incentive to not do that.
The problem of OB1 as for-profit is more related to the current size of the market. So my recommendation would be to continue OpenBazaar as a non-profit, but accepting donations if necessary. The problem might be that the venture capital investors would want to see some return, so it might even be needed to go into insolvency and start a new nonprofit project, e.g. a foundation. That would not affect the platform itself, only OB1 as a company, as OpenBazaar runs mostly independent from OB1.
The electric car dilemma was solved with subsidies, tons of money, and with tons of money you can save even openbazaar, but without unlimited funds and discounts, you need a product that is ....needed.
Well, electric cars imo are a bad example to compare to OpenBazaar, because it's a technology which needs huge investments in infrastructure.
OpenBazaar doesn't need as much money as that. As a platform, it is more similar to something like BitTorrent. It could work even if only a very small subset of e-commerce, or a part of e-commerce in a region (take countries with severe currency instability like Venezuela), would use it.
And now, we're back to three pages ago, who or rather how many of the people owning crypto are interested not only in purchasing stuff with their coins but do so through this., and the numbers are small, trust me, pretty damn small.
One thought about that: the hassle to cash out Bitcoins (e.g. due to stricter AML measures) is increasing, and so I guess it will become progressively more attractive to use Bitcoins to purchase goods instead.
Is there any news from them? Has something changed? Or will they be closed forever?
OpenBazaar cannot be "closed" as it's a P2P app. And OB1 (the company needing support) found a donor (some pages ago) to finance the next months.
