"It's actually about to enter the alpha testing phase. Tor is working with some manual steps. You can test out a week-old build here."
The situation appears to be that OpenBazaar has been used for a year for mostly legal trade due to the technical hurdles of using Open Bazaar with identity-hiding software like Tor and Tails. In fact, OpenBazaar does not work at all on Tails, though work is ongoing to promote this use case (https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_po...) and a release with Tor support is scheduled for August.
It feels like Open Bazaar is poised to become the next Silk Road. The keystone to achieve that is Tor support plus a Tails walkthrough guide. Both of these seem to be on the verge of being released.
I just wanted to clarify for onlookers that the Open Bazaar team seems to be going into this with both eyes open.
Developing a protocol is one thing. Going out of your way to enable anonymity as a means of acquiring users is a very interesting tactic. It's doubly interesting to repeatedly claim that Open Bazaar was not developed as a darknet market and "may not work for that use case" while also accepting merge requests for Tor support and eventually providing binaries that will work on Tails.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14829076 OB has taken $4M of investment. Perhaps investors are pushing you to acquire users. The DarkNet market crowd is certainly a large target market. Or perhaps all of your intentions are as transparent as you claim, and you're innocently laying the foundation to become the next Silk Road -- an unstoppable decentralized market accountable to no one.
Another american who has this baffling belief that things that aren't given permission by the government are illegal. Which, in a country full of guns, is kind of interesting. By the rationale you just espoused, the gun manufacturers should be held accountable for the actions of their users.
How about you start focusing on what THEY are doing that is supposedly 'illegal', instead of relying upon insinuation and surveillance.
The parent doesn't mention anything about the devs doing anything "illegal" or that they should be "held accountable" for it by the state, so I'm not sure why you argue as if they do.
Yep. Once Tor is integrated and people start using it for darknet-type activities, it won't be possible to hold anyone accountable or to shut it down. It's decentralized. Personally I find the implications pretty fascinating.
He was saying he would be facilitating illegal drug trade. I think he was implying that he would be at least partially responsible.
At the end of the day, the law/Constitution doesn't hold Tor developers accountable for what happens over Tor (nor should it), and I see the OpenBazaar developers being in exactly the same position. I don't think this discussion is even worth having. The case is settled from my point of view and such discussions only serve to cause FUD around the product.
> It feels like Open Bazaar is poised to become the next Silk Road.
It might be a decentralized replacement for Silk Road. But there won't be central servers to take down, or owners of such to arrest. I mean, Tor devs don't get busted, do they? So rather, I'd say that it could replace centralized dark markets.
Absolutely worth mentioning - because it implies similar roots as Tor: a project that provides a platform for plausible denials communication for the intelligence community in the case of Tor - for a "dénivelé" marketplace in the case of Open Bazaar.
Things like iran-contras would probably be easier today (under many Panopticon watchers) with such tech available.
Sure, unconstitutional military actions like Iran-Contra would be easier. But the key point is that suitably educated and skilled individuals can also do such stuff. Without nation-scale (or even corporate-scale) resources. That's what I meant about democratization of freedom.
Yeah, the point I was trying to make, is that having a real, anonymous digital marketplace might be very useful to intelligence agencies, so it might make sense for them to help build one. Without looking to build in back doors - just like naval intelligence might want an onion router system that works, and has enough traffic going through it that picking out the (smallish) sub-set that is intelligence traffic isn't trivial (eg: a traditional, secure, encrypted (overlay) network that is only used by a single/handful of intelligence agencies isn't very robust/useful for hiding communication).
So it's a legitimate concern that this software will be some sort of honeypot to hack and monitor those who have the technical skills to evade typical monitoring, who have a moral code that doesn't align with the federal government, and who probably have a general distrust in the federal government in the first place. It's not a secret at this point that the US government has an incredibly powerful intelligence gathering and spying apparatus, and there have been many signs that they are very willing to spy on those with questionable morals, regardless of whether or not there's any proof they're doing anything wrong.
For sure. Some have the same concerns about Tor. I mean, Paul Syverson does work for the US Navy. But of course, he's an ornery idealist who would never stand for Tor being backdoored. At least, that's the story. I'm ~90% convinced, but how would one be sure? Except that the code is open-source, anyway.
> So it's a legitimate concern that this software will be some sort of honeypot to hack and monitor those ... who have a moral code that doesn't align with the federal government ...
Yes. And it's not just about the US. The US government is a serious threat for many non-Americans, and does pretty much whatever it likes on the Internet. There are effectively no rules, and no justice. Only the raw exercise of power.
> ... regardless of whether or not there's any proof they're doing anything wrong.
You're wrong that they are supporting illegal dark type uses. The team has background in the American intelligence community. Some people are saying their aim is to push toward a backdoored or monitorable supposed darknet.
> the extent to which you're directly facilitating the darknet market migration
Since it's other people speculating and discussing how to integrate OB with Tails etc, shouldn't that more accurately be "indirectly facilitating (...)"?
You can question the ethics just the same, but it sounds like you're not, and already made up your mind.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_po...
"Well if the devs want massive adoption and 2.0 is functional then getting it to work on tails in the next 3 months will get them that."
"If someone would post an eli18 walkthrough on how to config tails so that OB 2.0 will work when that comes out that'd be great."
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6opqii/i_read_s...
"It's actually about to enter the alpha testing phase. Tor is working with some manual steps. You can test out a week-old build here."
The situation appears to be that OpenBazaar has been used for a year for mostly legal trade due to the technical hurdles of using Open Bazaar with identity-hiding software like Tor and Tails. In fact, OpenBazaar does not work at all on Tails, though work is ongoing to promote this use case (https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_po...) and a release with Tor support is scheduled for August.
In fact, most of the recent activity on the OpenBazaar subreddit has been questions about exactly that: sale of illegal substances. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oigt2/so_i_hea...
It feels like Open Bazaar is poised to become the next Silk Road. The keystone to achieve that is Tor support plus a Tails walkthrough guide. Both of these seem to be on the verge of being released.
I just wanted to clarify for onlookers that the Open Bazaar team seems to be going into this with both eyes open.
Developing a protocol is one thing. Going out of your way to enable anonymity as a means of acquiring users is a very interesting tactic. It's doubly interesting to repeatedly claim that Open Bazaar was not developed as a darknet market and "may not work for that use case" while also accepting merge requests for Tor support and eventually providing binaries that will work on Tails.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14829076 OB has taken $4M of investment. Perhaps investors are pushing you to acquire users. The DarkNet market crowd is certainly a large target market. Or perhaps all of your intentions are as transparent as you claim, and you're innocently laying the foundation to become the next Silk Road -- an unstoppable decentralized market accountable to no one.