Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

OpenBazaar, Born of an Effort To Build the Next Silk Road, Raises $1 Million

Posted by timothy on from the please-leave-your-comments-for-the-fbi-below dept.

Patrick O'Neill writes: After the fall of Silk Road, Amir Taaki built DarkMarket in an effort to offer a decentralized and "untouchable" market alternative. That's grown into OpenBazaar, a "censorship-resistant" protocol that just raised $1 million from venture capital firms Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as angel investor William Mougayar through the company OB1, which will now do core development on the software.

25 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Untouchable? by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

    Because the players here fight dirty.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Untouchable? by Canth7 · · Score: 2, Informative

      I would note that other articles on the OpenBazaar raise, do not use that word. Censorship-resistant seems to be the consensus on what the product aims to achieve.

    2. Re:Untouchable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Do you think you're special enough that you can use a monospace font? Get back in the short bus!

    3. Re:Untouchable? by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

      Only because someone cries "There ought to be a law" and it is so. And as long as politicians keep getting elected to make all the "there ought to be a law" laws, then we're stuck with that system.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    4. Re:Untouchable? by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      That, and secret laws, ignoring your Constitutional rights, trumping up a bunch of other charges to bully you into doing what they say ... oh, and the massive bit of institutional perjury which is embodies in parallel construction to deny you a proper legal defense.

      They'll come down pretty hard on anybody they think is enabling this kind of stuff, and they'll twist and reinterpret the law any way they need to.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    5. Re:Untouchable? by gweihir · · Score: 2

      Evolution at work. The smartest ones will survive. Those that were pretty successful so far until caught did not impress as being very smart and the process is obviously in an early stage. And those on the government side, fighting the utterly useless and destructive "War on everything we do not like" will not have anybody really smart among them, because smart people do not seek government employ.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    6. Re:Untouchable? by mrjimorg · · Score: 2

      Yes, but the Silk Road has to win every fight. If the government employee wins 1 - just 1 then the game is over.

    7. Re:Untouchable? by KGIII · · Score: 2

      There ought to be a law against that.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    8. Re:Untouchable? by DanielRavenNest · · Score: 2

      > because smart people do not seek government employ.

      That's a simplification. Smart people are discouraged from government employ because the pay scale is low. The Federal general salary (GS) scale tops out at 100-130K per year. However, other factors, like job security, not having to work very hard, or power over other people's lives can compensate for the low pay. A really interesting job can also attract smart people. Civilian U.S. astronauts are on the GS scale, and thus they top out at the same salaries as other federal employees. But they have a *really* interesting job, and I think all of them are pretty smart (I've met and worked with half a dozen or so).

    9. Re:Untouchable? by Stuarticus · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm going to guess that you think you are super smart and you don't work for the government. Am I close?

      --
      If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
    10. Re:Untouchable? by tehcyder · · Score: 3, Funny

      I was going to place him as a maverick private investigator who had to quit the force after hitting a superior officer/refusing to lie to protect a corrupt colleague, and is now a divorced loner with a drink problem and a fondness for some obscure type of music. The police come to him when a particularly difficult crime has them baffled, probably involving a locked room, the solution to which requires a couple of puns, and a working knowledge of Ancient Sumerian.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  2. e-bay & Alibaba killer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It has the potential to really hurt e-bay & Alibaba. Think about all those traders, that can sell their wares for free. It's a no-brainer to list your sites on OpenBazzar at the same time. Eventually the user-base will get to a point where e-bay is too expansive, and they will have to drop their prices.

  3. Re:I predict by Canth7 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It'll probably be about as a well received by authorities as PGP was back in the 1990s. Doesn't mean that it's not an important evolution of the way that ecommerce could work.

  4. Re:Straight to jail... by binarylarry · · Score: 3, Funny

    The stupid feds will never figure this one out! - Dread Pirate Roberts

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  5. Source available by anchovy_chekov · · Score: 2

    I assume this is the same project. Written in Python, MIT licence, FWTW

    https://github.com/OpenBazaar/...

  6. Re:Unpossible by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Except it will stop working when the people end-to-end never convert the cryptocurrencies into regular fiat currency.

    --
    Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
  7. Re:Straight to jail... by Crashmarik · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Fed3: Job Security (high five)

  8. Re:Unpossible by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 4, Informative

    I am not a dumbass. I speak for those that don't know certain things are even possible. Those that use SilkRoad /OpenBazzare probably already know about these things, or at least should. Your Grandma doesn't.

    Yes, you can (and should) use a new wallet every transaction, by default.

    Yes, you can wash your currency between transfers to new wallets, and probably should do that too.

    You and I are both well versed in these things, but most people are not.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  9. Freenet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All these stories about new darknets, TOR busts, and anonymous networks raising VC funding must tickle the Freenet guy(s) in an entertaining way. How come nobody talks about the darknet that's been around and in use for 15 years.

  10. Re:Unpossible by meta-monkey · · Score: 2

    But they will become versed in them, and new cryptocurrencies are under development all the time, and some of those will address these issues in ways that make it transparent for users. Even grandmas. Government trying to regulate them will be playing whackamole. It will be interesting.

    --
    We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
  11. Re:Can't win by anagama · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Come to Washington. All the pot sold in the legal recreational marijuana shops is grown here. Smoke all you want, no Mexican kingpin was enriched, and no innocent person shot.

    The ONLY reason there is violence associated with the manufacture and distribution of pot in other places, is because it is illegal. That leaves the market only to criminals, and criminals use violence as part of their business plan. When was the last time the CEOs of Coors and Budweiser got in a shoot out with each other?

    The problem with drug gangs could be eliminated immediately by legalizing drugs.

    --
    What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
  12. Re:Unpossible by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

    No, they won't. Most people don't have a clue what Fiat Currency actually means. They have no idea how the FED and world banking systems work. They barely know how anything works.

    This is the problem within the IT and Engineering crowds, we simply assume people are like us, when they are clearly not anything like us. We learn about things, all the time. The other people, the "average" guy, doesn't care to learn about the same things.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  13. Re:Unpossible by TXG1112 · · Score: 2

    It's fishier than that. From the link:

    The $1 million investment goes specifically to OB1, the newly formed company headed by CEO Brian Hoffman, previously a cybersecurity and IT consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton,

    Some background on Booz Allen:

    Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. is an American management consulting firm headquartered in Tysons Corner, Fairfax County, Virginia in Greater Washington DC, with 80 other offices throughout the United States. Its core business is the provision of management, technology and security services, to civilian government agencies, as a security and defense contractor[5] to defense and intelligence agencies, and to civil and commercial entities.

    Former Booz Allen guy running it? I hate to be the tinfoil hat guy (Ed note: liar, he really does) but that makes me skeptical.

    --
    I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
  14. Re:I do hope... by Atrox666 · · Score: 2

    Yeah there were some really scummy people trying to get rich off Silk Road.
    http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/30/...

  15. Re:I do hope... by swb · · Score: 2

    You mean like the mass market drug dealing done by Anheuser Busch, Starbucks, and Pfizer?

    Even under the old Silk Road it seemed a lot less unpleasant than some of the inner city liquor stores I've been to.