So is this OpenBazzar going to sell illegal or just legal goods, or maybe both? I was under the impression it was going to be another tor market but doesnt look to be the case.
I believe the idea is to be able to sell whatever the hell you want.
Hmm, I'm not against the idea, but would like a decentralised ebay site where 'normal' items could be bought and sold. Not sure I want to use a site where I have to sift through CP and weapons etc.
OpenBazaar trust and identity developer here. Thanks for your feedback.
We actually plan on a way to do exactly what you're describing. While these plans have not solidified quite yet, I will describe some of our initial ideas on how to tackle the issue you're mentioning. Here's how it will work.
Anyone can buy and sell anything they want on OpenBazaar with no censorship. However, when you first download the OpenBazaar client, the "projected trust" that you see towards vendors selling 'normal' items is going to be higher than the "projected trust" that you see towards vendors selling more unconventional products.
Because their trust is going to be low by default, when you search for products or browse product catalogs, you aren't going to see too many products that are illegal or otherwise conventionally unacceptable.
The way this will be achieved is that your client will start with certain bootstrapped edges on the web-of-trust from your node towards a selected list of nodes which will be hard-coded into the OpenBazaar client. To begin with, these will be the OpenBazaar developers, but we will grow that list as we mature. We will make sure these entry-point trusted nodes vouch only for "legitimate" sellers according to their opinion (which can vary and won't always be the same for all). We hope in this way to satisfy users who want to use OpenBazaar instead of eBay, avoid trade fees, and keep their purchases anonymous.
We value censorship-resistance a lot, and we believe in freedom of trade. I think people have a fundamental right to exchange goods as they wish, without "morality police" or governments, or even the OpenBazaar developers, deciding which goods are okay to buy and sell and which aren't. Therefore, if you do want to access stores that sell unconventional or illegal goods, of course we can't block or censor that, as we are a distributed market. In fact, we don't want to block these, as the ability to block products introduces single-points-of-failure.
For example, if the OpenBazaar team were able to decide which products are allowed and which aren't, a government with a (secret?) warrant could force us to stop products from being sold. We understand that legality and morality are not always aligned. My views on the matter
are detailed on a development team discussion.
The options you have for the case you want to trade goods that are not endorsed by the parties trusted by default are:
* You can lower the trust threshold that is used to decide which stores show up in your search results. However, this can affect your security, but you will be able to see a wider variety of stores.
* You can change your trust relationships on the web-of-trust. You can add new outgoing edges to your node, meaning your projected trust towards them will change based on what your friends vote for. I expect "black market" introductory points that you can add as trusted parties will appear on reddit, on bitcointalk, and other sources and give you access to unconventional markets without sacrificing security. In this case, you should make sure you add several of these in order to avoid centralization of power in your trust network.
* You can access stores directly by user-friendly secure names (namecoin-based). I expect certain trusted vendor names will start appearing on reddit, on bitcointalk, and other sources, and will allow users to discover merchants outside of the OpenBazaar network. (In fact, once a vendor is discovered, the Ricardian contract can also be exchanged in private outside of the OpenBazaar network and imported into the client.)
If you're interested in the technical details behind how the web-of-trust can work, please take a look at my paper
A pseudonymous trust system for a decentralized anonymous marketplace. It's not yet complete, but some of our ideas are detailed there.
