Quote from: bitcoinrocks on November 19, 2014, 09:25:00 PM

Quote from: bitcoinrocks on November 14, 2014, 03:19:46 PM

I was very disappointed to read that in order to sell something on OpenBazaar, you have to set up a node and keep it running all the time. If your node goes offline, so do your item listings apparently:

http://forum.openbazaar.org/index.php?p=/discussion/105/need-a-permanent-node-to-set-up-a-store

That seems like a potentially huge privacy/security hole and it's not what I'd considered decentralized.

Quote from: SamPatt on November 19, 2014, 02:43:58 AM

On the node issue: Yes, you need to either run a node yourself or connect to someone running a node in order to see the network.

Hi Sam, was your comment made in response to the issue I raised? If so, I think it's worth pointing out that you also need to run a node to connect to FreeMarket but that once you list your items there, it is no longer necessary to run a node since the listings are stored in the NXT blockchain. I am told that with OpenBazaar your node must remain online to keep your listings online because the listings are stored on the computer running the node instead of in the BTC blockchain.

Yes, I was pointing out why that isn't such a problem.

Blockchains are obviously awesome for many things, but we decided not to use the blockchain for storing information about product listings. Listings (or on our platform, Ricardian contracts) need to be able to change and be signed by multiple parties in a chain of commerce in order to provide an immutable record of trade. This wouldn't be able to be done quickly, at scale, with a blockchain.

If the only objection to running a peer to peer network is anonymity, there are many way to address this. First, you can join a peer to peer network and be anonymous; I2P, Freenet, Bittorrent and others have shown this. But more importantly, if you don't want to run a node for anonymity reasons, you won't have to. Services will exist that let you log into their node and conduct your business.

I looked for the NXT FreeMarket repository to see how they're dealing with problems like spamming the blockchain, reputation, escrow, multisig (does it use that?) price fluctuations, etc. I couldn't find it, is it open source? Can the community see how this product has been made?

I don't mean to dump on their product, I think we want as much competition in this space as possible. But creating a decentralized marketplace that is user friendly is very, very hard. We've had people using OpenBazaar for buying and selling real goods since August, but we still haven't gotten it to the point where we're calling it ready, and probably won't be for several more months.