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Comment by SamPatt | Hacker News Reader

Hey everyone, I'm Sam and I work on the OpenBazaar project. Happy to answer questions if anyone has them. Looks like their site is down, here's a simple overview:

https://blog.openbazaar.org/what-is-openbazaar/

We're getting close to launch and we'd love as many eyes on the code as possible.

Here's our backend, built in Python:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server

And our client:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Client

If you want to try it yourself I recommend you join our Slack and ask for help. We're building installers and packages now but I'm sure most people here could handle the manual installation process if they're curious. You can invite yourself to the Slack here:

https://openbazaar-slackin-drwasho.herokuapp.com/

Cheers!

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So if I understand correctly, OpenBazaar will be shifting costs from a central verification and fulfillment agency (Amazon, Visa, etc.) onto the buyers, sellers, and moderators of the market?

Buyers will have to spend more time researching vendors and moderators, then agreeing with a vendor on a moderator which will be difficult as no moderator can be 100% impartial and the largest 5-6 (that will develop due to natural economies of scale) will develop their own brands and reputations for being easy on buyers, easy on sellers, random coin toss, etc. Where is this cost made up for the buyers - will they see lower prices? Wouldn't it be more expensive as moderators need to be compensated for their services?

Also, from the pitch deck linked in the article [1] slides 48-51:

What about moderator reputation? Difficult problem to solve as there will always be on party that is happy with the result, and one that is unhappy. Transparency is the best approach...Negative or positive consensus on the quality of dispute resolution will inform Vendors and Buyers

How can there be a consensus on a moderator if one party is always happy and one is always unhappy? Won't the consensus always be 50/50?

Also, how do you plan to scale up transparency? Is that mostly a UX/UI challenge, or is there some clever mechanism to solve this through cryptographic/social hacking?

Last question: How will the leadership/dev of OpenBazaar be structured in the future? Will you guys develop something similar to the Linux Foundation under a non-profit charter? Will the foundation enact a transaction fee to fund itself?

Sorry for the barrage - just extremely interested as someone who has studied Bitcoin/blockchain tech in the past.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/drwasho/openbazaar-ratings-reviews...

> Also, how do you plan to scale up transparency?

I suggest using a web of trust akin to PGP signing mechanisms

>So if I understand correctly, OpenBazaar will be shifting costs from a central verification and fulfillment agency (Amazon, Visa, etc.) onto the buyers, sellers, and moderators of the market?

Yes. I try to explain this a bit more here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3zv6sc/sneak_peek_...

> Where is this cost made up for the buyers - will they see lower prices? Wouldn't it be more expensive as moderators need to be compensated for their services?

Yes, we expect lower prices would be the main draw for buyers. The price shouldn't be made up with moderation since moderators are only paid for services rendered - if there's no dispute then they aren't even aware of the transaction happening.

>How can there be a consensus on a moderator if one party is always happy and one is always unhappy? Won't the consensus always be 50/50?

What Dr. Sanchez is trying to get at is the fact that text reviews from other parties (and explanations from the mod) will be publicly viewable. That would allow a prospect to review them and see which side they think is more legitimate.

We recognize that decentralized reputation systems are basically the holy grail of p2p systems and we don't even pretend to be solving the problem, only giving users some information to make a more informed decision. I expect that many moderators will choose to publicly identify themselves and use their IRL reputation as well.

>Last question: How will the leadership/dev of OpenBazaar be structured in the future? Will you guys develop something similar to the Linux Foundation under a non-profit charter? Will the foundation enact a transaction fee to fund itself?

No transaction fees. It's open source, so even if we wanted to do this it would likely fail because people could always fork it and remove the fee.

Right now many of the core devs are a part of a company called OB1 (I'm a co-founder). We received $1 million from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz in order to lead development of the platform, push for network adoption, and then offer services to users on the network.

Cool, thanks for the response. You guys clearly know what you're getting into. Also thanks for the transparency on Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz - makes sense as Horowitz is probably the biggest bull out there on blockchain tech, which is pretty smart IMO.

One last question - how big is the potential market? That is, what is your estimate of the amount that Amazon spends on buyer/fraud protection services as a percent of their yearly revenue? Is that increasing or decreasing?

To me it seems like the key will be maintaining neutrality for as long as possible. Which should be reasonable as long as you continue to secure altruistic funding (ala Horowitz) from entities that are not looking for an exit on the short-medium timeframe.

>as long as you continue to secure altruistic funding

I've never heard of VCs being described as altruistic, and it is very far from my experience. Is this something people believe?

Also, asking, "how big is the potential market?" seems inappropriate, but ymmmv.

Once someone accrues enough money, they start to think about their personal legacy - case in point, Bill Gates. Horowitz could be thinking along similar lines if he is willing to be the patron of the blockchain in order to change the future of decentralized markets/fintech forever.

I've got my own estimates of the size of the market, was hoping to compare, but you're right - that's pretty sensitive info that the company probably paid for in order to pitch investors.

> We recognize that decentralized reputation systems are basically the holy grail of p2p systems and we don't even pretend to be solving the problem

Check out this proposed solution here. Fully decentralized; it's basically personalized page-rank, for people instead of websites.

https://github.com/neyer/respect

Do you offer any sort of anonymization?

It seems to me that this sort of thing might be better for auctioning off online services like vm hosting, etc, where delivery of the services can be confirmed pretty much instantaneously and automatically. Thoughts on that?

I read some of the slides, focusing on the sybil attack mitigation. Just how hard is this PoW? Is it really hard relative to the potential gain from fraud?

Is there any plan to add other cryptocurrencies?

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