It's like a darknet market (Silk Road, AlphaBay, etc) that can't be taken down by law enforcement. Or it's like a clearnet market (Ebay) that doesn't take a cut and works with bitcoin.
It looks like it uses multisig as a form of escrow [1], but the third party isn't in any way affiliated with openbazaar, just whoever the vendor and customer can agree to trust. It looks like users have to find a third party on their own, out-of-band [2]. I can see this working for small vendors, but I don't see how it would work with large vendors without the emergence of 1–3 large escrow services, which would diminish some of the benefits of decentralization.
This kind of multisig-based escrow will never be able to compete with Ebay. On Ebay, customers don't realize that they're paying Ebay to be a moderator because it's included in the price tag. On OpenBazaar they will be forced to pay attention to the escrow fee. I also fear that it will be impossible for escrow services to develop the necessary level of trust without being forced on vendors by the marketplace and still compete with the customer-favoring escrow that Ebay has.
It competes much better with darknet marketplaces, since it eliminates the possibility of sudden cash-outs or FBI raids on the scales that other markets have seen. They should accept that that's where they'll be successful and integrate some kind of anonymizing layer, probably tor, maybe i2p.
> Replying here because the stupid max comment depth was reached on your deeper comment
Note that there is no "max comment depth" on HN, and I don't know where this thought keeps coming from. There are a few reasons the "reply" link may not be shown:
- The comment was posted too recently, and you need to wait for the cooldown to expire. This is proportional to comment depth. It's said this is a flamewar prevention mechanism.
Your comment is unnecesarily presumptuous, but regardless...
I don't really understand why OpenBazaar would use UDP, and I can't seem to find any information about it, but it looks like they tell server operators to open up both a TCP and UDP port. I guess they might use it for DHT control messages? Their documentation site is down right now, so that's the best I got.
None of this is true. It's a web browser and server protocol for hosting web sites that can't be crawled by google. It is trivially censored. I have no idea who needs this.
I feel like this is partially correct. OB's peer-to-peer nature gives it the spirit of 'uncensorable,' in that no central authority can keep someone from making whatever listings they want. Though, individually, the shops are certainly censorship-prone since everything is clearnet.
A lot of people seem to think this is Bitcoin's 'killer app', which I don't agree with. I really can't see it pulling many legitimate users from established centralized companies. But I do think it's an interesting piece of work.
It looks like it uses multisig as a form of escrow [1], but the third party isn't in any way affiliated with openbazaar, just whoever the vendor and customer can agree to trust. It looks like users have to find a third party on their own, out-of-band [2]. I can see this working for small vendors, but I don't see how it would work with large vendors without the emergence of 1–3 large escrow services, which would diminish some of the benefits of decentralization.
This kind of multisig-based escrow will never be able to compete with Ebay. On Ebay, customers don't realize that they're paying Ebay to be a moderator because it's included in the price tag. On OpenBazaar they will be forced to pay attention to the escrow fee. I also fear that it will be impossible for escrow services to develop the necessary level of trust without being forced on vendors by the marketplace and still compete with the customer-favoring escrow that Ebay has.
It competes much better with darknet marketplaces, since it eliminates the possibility of sudden cash-outs or FBI raids on the scales that other markets have seen. They should accept that that's where they'll be successful and integrate some kind of anonymizing layer, probably tor, maybe i2p.
[1] https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/
[2] https://openbazaar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207548366