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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: 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