What uses do you see for this aside from illegal drugs, cybercrime, terrorism, child porn and human trafficking? Do you feel you're making the world a better place with this project?
I can speak objectively about this because I watch the network every day. Tens of thousands of listings on the network and the vast overwhelming majority are legal and moral. People use it because it's cheaper and more private than alternatives.
There are some illegal drugs on the network. Thus far I haven't seen any evidence of the other stuff you've claimed.
Perhaps it's human nature that people will eventually abuse the technology in that way, but it doesn't mean the technology isn't valuable, and it doesn't mean that the benefits don't outweigh the costs.
This is obviously an age-old debate about new technology, but if we had the mindset that any technology that can be used for evil shouldn't be allowed to exist then we wouldn't have TCP/IP and HTTP and SMS and SMTP, etc.
> You seriously can't imagine any uses for an online marketplace that aren't illegal??
> Have you bought or sold anything online in the last week? Those things could probably be done on OpenBazaar.
But will they? I don't think that's a fair summary of the criticism. There are already much more convenient alternatives for legally selling goods and services, using currency that's actually effectively currency, without using some command line tool to run a node. I think there are going to be three types of users: 1) people that are using it out mostly out of interest of the technology, 2) people to whom the platform is ideologically interesting i.e. anti-government types, libertarians, anti-corporate types etc., and 3) users that actually benefit from the anonymity and lack of censorship by selling illegal goods or completely avoiding taxes.
I wouldn't be surprised if the last category eventually grows much bigger than the former two. I only hope that it will be mostly illegal goods that don't harm really anyone, like cheap counterfeit consumer crap.
Would you have said the same things about eBay when eBay first launched?
"Who would buy anything on eBay when there are already more convenient alternatives?" ?
I buy almost everything on eBay because of the convenience of having the same search system and user interface for every type of thing I want to buy. I'd love to get a similar user experience without having to trust eBay as the arbiter of every single transaction. For example you can't buy knvives on eBay, so when I want to buy a knife I have to go somewhere else. I bought a number plate for my car on eBay recently (old one was cracked), and it all went fine, but when I went to buy another I found the seller's account had been shut down by eBay, for unspecified reasons. On OpenBazaar that wouldn't be able to happen.
> Would you have said the same things about eBay when eBay first launched?
Not really. I don't know of any much more convenient ways to facilitate auctions that predates eBay. I'm too young, really, to say out of experience how things were before eBay, but personally I went directly from browsing second hand stores and newspaper classifieds to use the local eBay clone which afforded it the additional convenience of only listing local items, but that was eventually bought by eBay as well.
For the general consumer I don't think that trust in eBay or having to go someplace else to buy knives and license plates is enough of an inconvenience to outweigh the inconvenience of trusting your bitcoins to have roughly the same value the day after tomorrow, or having to run a daemon to access listings.
I don't think you're wrong or that you have misplaced your priorities somehow, but I think you'd belong in category 1 and/or 2, and for as long as those aren't representative of the broad public I think services like OpenBazaar will mostly be attractive to those operating in the legal grays and blacks, simply thinking in terms of who's got most to gain from anonymity, lack of governance and untraceable transactions despite their inconveniences.
But let's say it attracts some 10000 (+/- an order of magnitude) privacy-minded cryptoanarchists that are all there because they don't trust sites like eBay or can't find some categories of legitimate items there because of some of eBay's rules. The sheer breadth of items, buyers and sellers afforded by a much more generally convenient site like eBay or CL won't be available to them, and I think that's going to turn a lot of people off that aren't explicitly looking to buy items that are much harder to get elsewhere. Maybe they'll find their knives and license plates but it'll be switchblades and counterfeits respectively.
Because we are discussing legality, I want to point out that you just aggregated and published these links, the developers of the OpenBazaar software did not. So if a crime is being committed here, which of you is more likely to be committing it?
There's a slim chance you or HN could receive a DMCA takedown notice, but sending OpenBazaar developers such a DMCA notice would be as foolish as sending Google Chrome developers a DMCA notice demanding they delete the comment you posted or the pages you linked to. Would that work?
You should also be informed that DMCA is not relevant to over half of your links. Its target is copyright circumvention, not narcotics sales etc.
The individuals allegedly selling those possibly illegal things could receive legal actions like DMCA and narcotics laws, and even you might for linking to them. But I was not talking about those individuals, only the irony that you are at greater legal risk than the OpenBazaar developers.
This comment seems to suggest that your're unaware of the big difference between OpenBazaar and the Silk Road, which is why you believe my comments about legality are disingenuous and irrelevant.
The most important issue is that OpenBazaar is software and the other was a service based around a website.
Why do you comment so confidently and enthusiastically, when you apparently understand so little?
You should be right imho, but neither you nor antagonist knows how the laws of various countries will eventually rule on OB. Is it a platform or is it just software? ... TBD
zaggynl posts clear evidence that OpenBazaar is being used for illegal and immoral purposes, and instead of addressing his point you snipe irrelevantly about link aggregating.
Imagine actually investing in this. This is social workers as a service, because of course a bunch of Stanford nerds and SV VC elites know how to fix society better than anyone else. You couldn't come up with satire better than this.
So like what happens when the first 22 yr old "community assistance team member" gets raped and chopped up into pieces by one of your clients? Is that just the price of disruption?
Back in the day I used to look at the Top 10 list on what.cd, download torrents of interesting music, add them to my seedbox, wait for them to finish, download the files from the seedbox, import into iTunes, fix up the tags and artwork if needed, then finally sync to my phone. Then I'd have to do all that again for my girlfriend and the terrible music she liked.
Now I just have to hit one download button in Music on my phone. I have unlimited access to--as far as it matters to me--basically the entire iTunes libary. My wife does too, and she can play it through the Sonos system at the house. It's great and well worth the $15/month and various UI glitches.
Agreed on most of your points. Except that Spotify has he same functionality plus awesome curation and discovery. If you're not that into top music, there are gems to be found
I know it's a silly grudge to hold, but I still avoid Spotify just because the Free tier was so awful when I first tried it. I suppose it's the classic debate of time-limited demo versus feature-limited demo -- the former works much better for me.
According to Spotify's list of countries, [1] it's available in 73 countries. Apple Music is available in about 115 countries according to Apple's list. [2] In this comparison, there are many prominent names missing in Spotify's list, not just India.
As for Spotify opening in India next year (2019), that's already quite late to the game, in my view.
the only good thing that came from it was that i got better at typing (this was before there was software that would download the track names from the internet and you would have to manually type in each track name)
