MOSCOW, November 8 (RIA Novosti) - While the FBI has recently taken down the second incarnation of the notorious Silk Road, the bigger challenge federal agents now face is the peer-to-peer OpenBazaar, a decentralized market with no single owner, the Business Insider reports.
OpenBazaar is a spin-off of the DarkMarket, launched in April. It was developed by a programmer Amir Taaki to create a decentralized network which cannot be shut down like Silk Road. The same month the idea of an anonymous decentralized market won the top prize at a Toronto Bitcoin Hackathon.
Brian Hoffman, credited on the official website as the project lead, rebranded DarkMarket as OpenBazaar in late summer. The new project is aimed at “building a platform of free trade, where anyone can exchange goods and services via the Internet in an uncensored and privacy-respecting manner,” according to a post published on the official website.
OpenBazaar is an open-source software, which allows users to set up their own shops to trade any items they want. Unlike Amazon or eBay, the network does not have a middleman. The system sets up two users who want to buy and sell and choses another one as an arbiter to ensure that the deal goes smoothly. Every participant is rated and users are required to provide feedback on a transaction. The goods or services traded via OpenBazaar are paid for in bitcoin.
“We’re just really passionate about allowing peer-to-peer trade to happen online. We want that to exist,” and Sam Patterson, the operations lead, told Wired. “The internet allowed you to communicate directly. Bitcoin allowed you to send money directly. Now you can trade directly,” he added.
An uncensored and anonymous trade in itself is by no means illegal. However, many fear that illicit exchange of goods will flourish on a decentralized network. “OpenBazaar is the heir apparent to a lucrative empire of illicit, anonymous, online trading worth hundreds of millions of dollars at least,” Patrick Howell O’Neill points out in article published by the Business Insider.
Patterson argues OpenBazaar is not developed to replace Silk Road or any of its numerous spin-offs on the black market. “We’re not the ‘Super Silk Road.’ We’re trying to replace eBay in a better form,” he said, as quoted by Wired. “We recognize that people may choose to use that technology in a way we see as distasteful, immoral, and illegal, but we’re giving them the option to engage in a kind of human interaction that doesn’t exist right now.”
OpenBazaar reiterated that sentiment in a recent tweet. On November 6, after Silk Road 2.0 was shut down OpenBazaar stated: “With today’s news we want to remind anyone using OpenBazaar that we don’t condone illegal activity.”
With today’s news we want to remind anyone using OpenBazaar that we don’t condone illegal activity.
— OpenBazaar (@openbazaar) 6 ноября 2014
Nevertheless, OpenBazaar by definition is a lucrative space for illicit trade because it cannot be shut down by law enforcement agents. If two users engage in an illegal activity, they can be arrested but the network itself remains in place. In that respect OpenBazaar resembles the BitTorrent software, often used to illegally exchange copyrighted material, like movies, music, software, etc. “Without a centralised headquarters, the authorities would have no choice but to track down every single OpenBazaar user individually; and it would be all but impossible to shut down the network entirely,” The Guardian noted in April.
In late September, OpenBazaar released a second beta version of its software. The project intends to publish a full release in 2015.
