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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: 1) by looorg on Sunday August 31 2014, @05:13PM
It might not have been built for illegal trading but then what else would you want or need a pseudonymous trading platform for? Most people don't care if other people know that they buy normal everyday stuff. What is left then is the seedy underbelly of commerce such as drugs, guns and (weird) sex things. Things people are, for one reason or another, ashamed of buying or that they know are illegal.
If everything is going to be stored on everyonce machine how long will it takes before someone figures out the storage system and starts to mess with it, either to siphon off currency or to poison the bazaar with erroneous or faulty information.
After all if Ebay or Amazon or whomever thought there was big business in selling stuff for bitcoins, or some other cryptocurrency, they would start doing it tomorrow.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:01PM
I don't understand the prejudice against private transactions. People with this prejudice, assume that they know for all time what is and what is not a "legitimate" purchase. There is nothing that prevents a future despot from deciding that X, Y or Z, however innocent it may seem, is dangerous and people who have purchased such items deserve closer monitoring or worse. Such laws have a long history and even get their own special category with the requisite latin name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law [wikipedia.org] (and note, while the Supreme Court has limited the prohibition to criminal laws (see the US section in that link) -- civil issues are not affected and while you may not face prison over a civil issue, you can quite literally lose everything you have and get garnished on anything new you might get).
So while the constitution prohibits such laws, it has been punched through with holes and interpretations -- besides what worth does the constitution have today with respect to any personal privacy issue? Take for example the immunization of the telecommunications companies who had been breaking the law to help out the NSA violate the 4th Amendment? Sure, that made illegal behavior "legal" (ignoring Constitutional issues), but if the government can do that, what's to stop them from making legal behavior illegal? And don't say "the Constitution" -- it's just a piece of paper that nobody in DC cares about, except as a background image to use in popup adverts.
(Score: 1) by looorg on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:34PM
If that (future evil despot) is your reasoning for anonymous purchases what do you think they will think about anonymous transactions in general? You'll be screwed either way even if you just bought normal things.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:56PM
It is much more likely that the future despot doesn't arise as a full-on-instant-evil, but rather gradually and progressively. I'm old enough I suspect I'll be dead before full-on-evil, but not so old that I will take your defeatist attitude of assuming that the choice is between privacy and the instantaneous arising of the worst possible future. Besides, the best way to prevent such a terrible future is to make it too expensive to implement -- rolling over and acquiescing by doing no private transactions makes that future more possible, while mixing it up with private transactions (all you need is cash) poisons the data to some extent.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday August 31 2014, @10:36PM
The slippery slope argument is weak unless you can demonstrate that it is indeed a slippery slope. I'll put it this way: I've spent time with people who lived under full-blown totalitarian communism (Cuba, East Germany, Ukraine), and none of those governments were really focused on tracking the money spent by ordinary people. They were really interested in who people were talking to socially and what they were thinking about the despot, but with everyone mostly broke and with only basics like food and medicine for sale these totalitarian governments had very little interest in purchasing habits.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 31 2014, @10:55PM
And? The US isn't Cuba. We aren't as rich as we once were, but we have a long way to fall to get to that level. Besides, the NSA is already monitoring purchases: http://business.time.com/2013/06/11/big-brother-is-watching-you-swipe-the-nsas-credit-card-data-grab/ [time.com] so it really doesn't matter if other despots failed to monitor purchases. Our own are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @07:09PM
Most people don't care if other people know that they buy normal everyday stuff.
Every day more and more people are starting to care. That's because every day corporations and governments are abusing their access to transactional data to build databases of perfectly law-abiding citizens for whatever purposes they can dream up and they are doing it in complete secrecy.
We don't have agency in our own data anymore - they take it and do whatever they want with it and not only do we not know who has that information there is nothing we can do about it. Systems like this are a direct response to that loss of agency. If I can't control what data is collected about me and who gets access to it then I will do my damnedest to make sure that data simply isn't created in the first place. They can't record what doesn't exist.
After all if Ebay or Amazon or whomever thought there was big business in selling stuff for bitcoins, or some other cryptocurrency, they would start doing it tomorrow.
Nevermind that your analysis terribly oversimplifies the situation (like how ebay's ownership of paypal makes them a competitor to bitcoin)
What about Newegg, [newegg.com] Overstock, [overstock.com] Expedia [techcrunch.com] and even Dish Networks? [dish.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @11:21PM
Expedia sucks.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 01 2014, @05:13AM
It may be so, but then again it does have the ability to suck on Bitcoins.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday September 01 2014, @12:42PM
1702845791×2