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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: 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".