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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, @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.