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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

>Can a more open platform for sellers without the stigma of illegal activity be realized?

Probably not.

Cars weren't invented to make bank robberies more difficult to stop. These networks were invented, to a degree which shouldn't be dismissed when considering their acceptance by the mainstream, to make enforcing laws against trading in anything more difficult, if not impossible.

I think most people (not most people on HN, or in tech, but most people in general) would rather pay the extra few dollars than support the premise of a truly free market. While I would agree completely that there are perfectly legitimate uses for these networks, and there is nothing at all evil or malicious in the technology itself, I also think it would be disingenuous to state that their use in illegal activities is somehow orthogonal to their purpose.

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> , I also think it would be disingenuous to state that their use in illegal activities is somehow orthogonal to their purpose.

The Haber Process[1] was a new way to manufacture ammonia in large quantities. Fritz Haber was originally motivated by Germany's war objectives to kill people via poison gas and explosives. Germany needed a lot of synthetic ammonia to do that.

Now, the Haber process is mass producing fertilizer and feeding the world.

It's possible to divorce the original evil uses of the technology from the later good ones.

The potential 200 million ebay and whatever millions of amazonmarketplace legal sellers can outnumber the criminals. The 10% ebay fees and 15% amazon commissions are very compelling motivators to create an "open SMTP" type of marketplace for sellers.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

The motivation for development was actually producing fertilizer, as it says in the article you linked.

Yes, my memory was not accurate and I should have specified Haber-Bosch Process & Carl Bosch[1] instead of Haber Process & Fritz Haber.

Apparently, Carl Bosch's refinements to the original Haber Process had the priority goal of ramping up Germany's war munitions instead of feeding the world.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Bosch

>It's possible to divorce the original evil uses of the technology from the later good ones.

Yes, but I would argue that doing so in this case means undermining the entire purpose of an anonymous, decentralized marketplace.

The first question most people are going to want an answer to when presented with something like OpenBazaar is "what are you going to do about the pedophiles, gun-runners, drug dealers, etc?"

If the free market's response to this is "nothing, so long as the customer gets what they paid for, everything is cool," then for most people accepting this equivalence will be a non-starter.

I think the only ways to avoid this problem are 1) hoping for a widespread shift in the way most people view the value of the force of law on commerce, 2) breaking the system enough so mainstream users are convinced of its legal integrity, or 3) pretending it's not an issue and redefining the terms by which it's sold to the public. And i'm not entirely certain the latter can scale.

I won't say it's impossible though.

> The first question most people are going to want an answer to when presented with something like OpenBazaar is "what are you going to do about the pedophiles, gun-runners, drug dealers, etc?"

And the answer is simple: treat them as early adopters. Learn from their needs, and find out how they attempt to game or break the system. (They certainly will.)

No, I'm not trying to be flippant. For ANY new, more privacy-minded tehnology, you have to expect that the dubious and/or illicit users will flock to it first. They are the ones who will actively seek out the communication and exchange mediums that are hard to monitor. Their presence will then act as a catalyst for media to write about the technology, effectively taking it from the fringes to mainstream.

PGP. Tor. Bitcoin. Hell, even the attacks on encrypt-by-default storage technology in mobile phones. The fearmongering of the law 3-letter agencies and the media's need to find new monsters under the bed all act as drivers for more widespread knowledge, and eventually through acceptance to adoption.

The pendulum swings, and right now it's starting the backswing towards more privacy-minded approaches.

I think you underestimate the average Joe's desire to save a few dollars... The key barriers I see are having to install special software and getting to grips with Bitcoin.

Perhaps it is possible to ship a client with some default blacklisting of certain products, sellers etc, if a person wants to avoid stumbling by accident across such stuff. (Maybe even such blacklists would become updated and mandated by law.)

You need to insulate the user from the Bitcoin transaction entirely. It should look to the user like they're paying in local currency. Unfortunately, we're not there yet. We know how to create an automated p2p currency exchange, we think. But nobody's done it yet.

oh yeah? you have a repo I can check out?

Uhm no. Wasn't that the entire point of my comment?

I read it more along the lines of "some folks and I have come up with a reasonable solution, but it's nowhere near production ready so no one would want to test it."

My bad

Ah, I see now. My apologies.

For a long time Alibaba.com was a haven for counterfeit goods. Some argued that was its primary purpose (and indeed there were hints of racism in this - claims that the Chinese did no original work etc.)

You can still get some counterfeit goods on Alibaba. That didn't stop the platform becoming valuable for legitimate purposes too.

it's also worth considering that while existing middlemen are slightly more expensive they also offer strong consumer protections that are totally absent in these alternatives

OpenBazaar uses a three-way transaction. Buyer, seller, mediator. Only two keys are required to release or revert the transaction. In the event of a dispute The mediator is the final judge, they're supposed to decide based on evidence whether to release th payment to the seller or refund the buyer. I do not recall off-hand what the selection criteria is for the mediators, but I believe that it's not in the control of either party.

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