Since you have merged PRs allowing use via Tor, you seem to be tacitly encouraging Open Bazaar to be used by those who want to hide their identity. In the wake of the recent darknet market closures, people have been saying that the drug trade might move to decentralized markets like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14828864
As facilitators of this technology, do you have an opinion on how it should be used? Are you concerned that the primary use case might be to acquire drugs? And are there any controls in place to encourage or discourage certain types of items from being bought and sold on this platform, or is it a complete free-for-all?
Dear Vint Cerf, since you have created TCP-IP, and another contemporary of yours - HTTP, you seem to be tacitly encouraging a decentralized worldwide exchange of information used by billions around the globe to facilitate exchange of ideas, pleasure, and commerce, free from government censor...
I thinks it totally different. At the end of the day, the law could reach the original Internet. It really wasn't much different than telephone lines. Encryption is where everything changes. I think everyone should be at least a little bit nervous about where these crypto technologies are taking us. Once criminals learn how to use this technology, there's probably no going back.
Drug purchasing sites have actually helped reduce violence and crime associated with prohibited items/activities. I'm more nervous about where authoritarian government is taking us.
This paper doesn't directly support what you said. In the abstract it says: "With Silk Road functioning to considerable degree at the wholesale/broker market level, its virtual location should reduce violence, intimidation and territorialism."
There are 3 mentions of the word "violence", one says that the typical internet drug dealer is typically less violent than their offline counterparts but this doesn't meant that gangs will just let others take away their income because the new dealer is dealing out of a living room instead of on the street. Silk Road was B2B, as the paper mentions. But those businesses still need to get their drugs to the end user which seemingly happens on the street.
That way, a registered nurse/healthcare official who has a job/career to lose if someone overdoses. Nothing is stopping a random dealer using a DNM from cutting a batch with fentanyl, and anonymity means they can fake reviews and hide it
Keep in mind that OpenBazaar has been used for over a year now, and only a small minority of the trade has been illicit. Most people just want a platform where they can buy / sell in crypto and avoid marketplace fees.
We built OpenBazaar to be an agnostic protocol for trade online. It's like any other protocol in that it's neutral, and people can use it how they please. I don't like the idea of people using it for immoral things, but that's their decision.
I know linking to a reddit thread might be heresy here, but I talked about the more on our subreddit (I'm CC_EF_JTF):
"It's actually about to enter the alpha testing phase. Tor is working with some manual steps. You can test out a week-old build here."
The situation appears to be that OpenBazaar has been used for a year for mostly legal trade due to the technical hurdles of using Open Bazaar with identity-hiding software like Tor and Tails. In fact, OpenBazaar does not work at all on Tails, though work is ongoing to promote this use case (https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/6oifak/is_it_po...) and a release with Tor support is scheduled for August.
It feels like Open Bazaar is poised to become the next Silk Road. The keystone to achieve that is Tor support plus a Tails walkthrough guide. Both of these seem to be on the verge of being released.
I just wanted to clarify for onlookers that the Open Bazaar team seems to be going into this with both eyes open.
Developing a protocol is one thing. Going out of your way to enable anonymity as a means of acquiring users is a very interesting tactic. It's doubly interesting to repeatedly claim that Open Bazaar was not developed as a darknet market and "may not work for that use case" while also accepting merge requests for Tor support and eventually providing binaries that will work on Tails.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14829076 OB has taken $4M of investment. Perhaps investors are pushing you to acquire users. The DarkNet market crowd is certainly a large target market. Or perhaps all of your intentions are as transparent as you claim, and you're innocently laying the foundation to become the next Silk Road -- an unstoppable decentralized market accountable to no one.
Another american who has this baffling belief that things that aren't given permission by the government are illegal. Which, in a country full of guns, is kind of interesting. By the rationale you just espoused, the gun manufacturers should be held accountable for the actions of their users.
How about you start focusing on what THEY are doing that is supposedly 'illegal', instead of relying upon insinuation and surveillance.
The parent doesn't mention anything about the devs doing anything "illegal" or that they should be "held accountable" for it by the state, so I'm not sure why you argue as if they do.
Yep. Once Tor is integrated and people start using it for darknet-type activities, it won't be possible to hold anyone accountable or to shut it down. It's decentralized. Personally I find the implications pretty fascinating.
He was saying he would be facilitating illegal drug trade. I think he was implying that he would be at least partially responsible.
At the end of the day, the law/Constitution doesn't hold Tor developers accountable for what happens over Tor (nor should it), and I see the OpenBazaar developers being in exactly the same position. I don't think this discussion is even worth having. The case is settled from my point of view and such discussions only serve to cause FUD around the product.
> It feels like Open Bazaar is poised to become the next Silk Road.
It might be a decentralized replacement for Silk Road. But there won't be central servers to take down, or owners of such to arrest. I mean, Tor devs don't get busted, do they? So rather, I'd say that it could replace centralized dark markets.
Absolutely worth mentioning - because it implies similar roots as Tor: a project that provides a platform for plausible denials communication for the intelligence community in the case of Tor - for a "dénivelé" marketplace in the case of Open Bazaar.
Things like iran-contras would probably be easier today (under many Panopticon watchers) with such tech available.
Sure, unconstitutional military actions like Iran-Contra would be easier. But the key point is that suitably educated and skilled individuals can also do such stuff. Without nation-scale (or even corporate-scale) resources. That's what I meant about democratization of freedom.
Yeah, the point I was trying to make, is that having a real, anonymous digital marketplace might be very useful to intelligence agencies, so it might make sense for them to help build one. Without looking to build in back doors - just like naval intelligence might want an onion router system that works, and has enough traffic going through it that picking out the (smallish) sub-set that is intelligence traffic isn't trivial (eg: a traditional, secure, encrypted (overlay) network that is only used by a single/handful of intelligence agencies isn't very robust/useful for hiding communication).
So it's a legitimate concern that this software will be some sort of honeypot to hack and monitor those who have the technical skills to evade typical monitoring, who have a moral code that doesn't align with the federal government, and who probably have a general distrust in the federal government in the first place. It's not a secret at this point that the US government has an incredibly powerful intelligence gathering and spying apparatus, and there have been many signs that they are very willing to spy on those with questionable morals, regardless of whether or not there's any proof they're doing anything wrong.
For sure. Some have the same concerns about Tor. I mean, Paul Syverson does work for the US Navy. But of course, he's an ornery idealist who would never stand for Tor being backdoored. At least, that's the story. I'm ~90% convinced, but how would one be sure? Except that the code is open-source, anyway.
> So it's a legitimate concern that this software will be some sort of honeypot to hack and monitor those ... who have a moral code that doesn't align with the federal government ...
Yes. And it's not just about the US. The US government is a serious threat for many non-Americans, and does pretty much whatever it likes on the Internet. There are effectively no rules, and no justice. Only the raw exercise of power.
> ... regardless of whether or not there's any proof they're doing anything wrong.
You're wrong that they are supporting illegal dark type uses. The team has background in the American intelligence community. Some people are saying their aim is to push toward a backdoored or monitorable supposed darknet.
> the extent to which you're directly facilitating the darknet market migration
Since it's other people speculating and discussing how to integrate OB with Tails etc, shouldn't that more accurately be "indirectly facilitating (...)"?
You can question the ethics just the same, but it sounds like you're not, and already made up your mind.
Because gov't tends to control everything over time, as it becomes more and more powerful. Rewind that back to the American Revolution and you'd see the federal gov't being less autocratic and states being more autonomous. The Civil War was a turning point. This is not a case with the UK however, because they did not have an equivalent of the French Revolution.
It won't let me buy anything from any of the vendors I've tried
It says:
"The vendor's server has rejected the purchase request. This may be due to a connection issue. Check your purchase data, such as quantity and Bitcoin refund address, to make sure it is valid. If it is valid, try again in a few seconds. Reason: vendor rejected contract". I've also gotten " Reason: unable to reach vendor"
I run the main OB store, and I haven't noted problems selling. One of the difficulties of running a p2p network is that you cannot control how up to date the software is from other peers. We try to keep as much compatibility as possible when making changes, but the network has been live over a year now and never everyone stays updated.
Many of the problems we had with the current version are also alleviated with the 2.0 we are releasing soon.
OpenBazaar never worked for me either.
The only time I actually bought something, the seller laughed me off and didn't post anything. Messages to "moderator" were ignored.
Since using the software is painful (it's an Electron app after all), I gave up.
I think that has been the experience of everyone that actually tried it more than once
Same problem here, with different products from different vendors and several retries. My guess would be some packets blocked by my firewall, but I haven't tried to verify this.
Are you concerned at all about legal ramifications of OpenBazaar? It seems like if you guys succeed, you're going to have to deal with lots of illegal transactions. Are you able or willing to work with law enforcement in these cases?
They have to tread very, very carefully here. I seem to remember early demo screenshots with weed as a sample product. Not exactly a good call.
There's a reason all the piracy tools show things like Big Buck Bunny downloading, playing, etc. You may want the illegal uses to be present on the service - I don't blame them I like the anarchic feeling of it and the lack of regulation that is possible in the system, it's beautiful in a way - but you can't go around advertising it for law breaking purposes, condoning that kind of thing will just get you screwed too.
Weed is actually a perfect example of the utility of this platform. The sale of recreational marijuana is legal in some US states and other parts of the world. The main hurdle for online retailers of controversial industries is the lack of support from financial institutions. The same problem can manifest itself indirectly with any service a business relies on.
If you build a commerce platform on top of old infrastructure, you will be subject to old social and moral constraints. To build a truly free commerce platform you have to start from scratch.
" The sale of recreational marijuana is legal in some US states and other parts of the world. The main hurdle for online retailers of controversial industries is the lack of support from financial institutions."
The reason why many financial institutions don't accept Marijuana related clients is not because they don't want to its because they can't by law. In the USA, Marijuana is still illegal at a federal level. This is the same reason why you can't ship weed products in the post. State lines.
I have a client who's in the medical Marijuana industry so I have to deal with some issues relating to all of this.
Banks that don't cross state lines often do accept such customers (i.e credit unions).
Right. The current solution is to trust local services will continue to support your business's activities. That trust represents a risk that can be avoided by building on top of a decentralized infrastructure for payments and hosting.
Yeah, the kind of person who's alerted of this tech's criminal potential by pictures of weed etc., rather than knowing about it through other means, isn't the type of person you would feel safe conducting an illegal transaction with.
One would expect that devs would be unable to assist law enforcement. Except to say that it's hopeless. That's pretty much what Tor Project says. Maybe that's just BS, of course. But one can hope.
An official statement from OpenBazaar devs would be good.
Yeah, one would hope that cooperation with law enforcement would be hopeless. Otherwise the decentralised nature of OB, and its impartiality, would be called into question.
This looks incredibly interesting, thank you! I have one question: how do you handle updates using IPFS? Say a seller updates the price of item X, then a user places an order while the seller is offline based on the older price (which is presumably cached in IPFS still)?
All the store data is kept inside a directory, the hash of which is mapped to your peer ID using IPNS. This enables all store data to be downloaded and authenticated using the peer ID.
Any change to the contents of your directory causes the root hash to change and the IPNS mapping is republished.
Mappings a numbered so when looking up a store via it's ID nodes will always use the most recent mapping they can find.
Republishing the IPNS root breaks the caching that accumulated on the root, but all objects inside the directory that haven't changed retain their caching.
I'm not one of the developers, who would be able to answer this definitively (you can join our slack if you like to ask). But I believe it's accomplished by using IPNS for some of the calls instead of IPFS, to ensure that the data is up to date.
It does mean that one of the benefits of using IPFS - the seeding of data - only works when there aren't frequent changes to a store. The idea is setting a store up and being able to go offline for a few days while others seed, then when you come back online and make changes, the new changes need to get re-seeded again.
IPFS is smart enough to handle changes per-object (maybe per-block even?), so you don't need to change everything, unchanged things still get seeded by the people who already had them.
Edit: Note that this uses Testnet Bitcoin, not real bitcoin yet. Also, purchasing might not work since we're still making breaking changes somewhat often.
We're about to enter the alpha testing phase so if people want an invite let me know.
This website links to the current version of OpenBazaar, but we're just about to launch a completely new version, which you can read about here:
https://medium.com/openbazaarproject/openbazaar-2-0-p2p-trad...
The 2.0 is built with Go and uses IPFS. It's open source and we welcome any developers into the project:
https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go