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from the shocked-to-discover-there's-gambling-in-this-establishment dept.
Wired has a story about OpenBazaar, a software project created with the idea of being to e-commerce what BitTorrent was to file sharing. From the article:
This weekend, the developers behind OpenBazaar plan to release a beta version of the software designed to let anyone privately and directly buy and sell goods online with no intermediary. They describe it as “pseudonymous, uncensored trade.” Rather than hosting its commerce on any server, OpenBazaar installs on users’ PCs, and allows them to list products in a file stored in a so-called “distributed hash table,” a database spread across many users’ machines. Everything will be paid in bitcoin. The result of that peer-to-peer architecture, they hope, will be a marketplace that no one—–no government, no company, not even the OpenBazaar programmers—can regulate or shut down.
But Patterson and OpenBazaar founder Brian Hoffman adamantly insist OpenBazaar isn’t designed for selling narcotics, guns, or other contraband. They see their invention as a freer, more democratic eBay or Craigslist, with no seller fees and no one to arbitrarily change the rules or censor products. “We’re not the ‘Super Silk Road.’ We’re trying to replace eBay in a better form,” says Patterson. “We recognize that people may choose to use that technology in a way we see as distasteful, immoral, and illegal, but we’re giving them the option to engage in a kind of human interaction that doesn’t exist right now.”
(Score: 3, Interesting) by geb on Sunday August 31 2014, @02:13PM
This kind of marketplace does at least let us spot the difference between principled libertarians and selfish arseholes.
A lot of libertarians would argue that you don't need much regulation on products, because responsible customers will refuse to buy anything from an unethical company. Personally I think we need more layers of protection than that, but I can still respect the idea. It recognises a problem and offers a solution. A libertarian of that type should be horrified by the idea of an anonymous marketplace because it completely eliminates any chance of choosing to buy from an ethical supplier. You have no idea who the supplier is. Is your weed coming from some friendly local guy with a plastic greenhouse in the woods, or from a vast murderous cartel? Who knows!
Anybody actually supporting anonymous transactions is making the implicit statement that they don't care where the money goes, doesn't care about the consequences when they vote with their wallet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday August 31 2014, @02:24PM
Another factor here: Imagine what this will do to your local economy. If you start buying all your drugs online, a whole network of smugglers and dealers will be destroyed! The local guy's money goes to local (illegal) gun dealers, convenience stores, and of course paying off the local police forces. Whereas if you buy mail-order, your money goes directly to $DEITY-knows-where (as the parent poster points out), and only partially re-enters the US economy when it gets laundered by a major bank like HSBC.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by khallow on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:33PM
What do you mean by an anonymous marketplace? It's not like the stock market where you're buying and selling shares of weed without regard for who the other side of the transaction is. After all, the other guy might be a law enforcement agent and your weed still has to go to a physical address at some point in order for you to smoke it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:50PM
A libertarian of that type should be horrified by the idea of an anonymous marketplace because it completely eliminates any chance of choosing to buy from an ethical supplier.
Pseudonymous is not the same thing as anonymous.
You should read this other story at wired [wired.co.uk] about how great the customer service and quality levels are at another pseudonymous marketplace.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Sunday August 31 2014, @10:30PM
I would disagree, I support anonymous transactions. I can also honestly say I do NOT support any sort illegal transactions, in principle. I do however believe liberty and not being spied on by governments or groups of human beings who think they are above everyone else is way way more important than groups of human beings abusing the system for illegal transactions. Ideally we should prevent both, but if not I'd choose the latter over the former any day.
My interpretation of the article is that this type of marketplace does not actually let you distinguish between the two or in fact allow any type of surveillance to distinguish what is happening. I still think its better than a marketplace where I get spied on my groups of people claiming to be "the forces of good and holy".