Back in April 2014, DarkMarket, a decentralized anonymous marketplace with a name guaranteed to fuel the nightmares of conservatives everywhere, was forked and given a more widely acceptable title.
The resulting, friendlier-sounding, OpenBazaar, was a fully functional, free to use, peer-to-peer (P2P) market platform with robust decentralized infrastructure that enabled commercial activities to be conducted outside the control of third parties.
If that sounded like a formula for another illicit drugs marketplace such as the notorious Silk Road, the project lead Brian Hoffman stressed that that wasn’t the aim.
Speaking to CoinDesk in June of that year, Hoffman spelled out the central value proposition for OpenBazaar as being the freedom of two parties to transact without needing to rely on the security and integrity of a questionable centralized service, adding that the team behind the project will push for lawful uses of its service.
A redesigned and improved OpenBazaar launched in test mode on 2nd March. The test period during which the site only accepts "testnet bitcoin," which has no value, is intended to help the developers identify as many bugs as possible, with as little risk as possible.
The project’s test version has been downloaded more than 19,593 times and early vendors are up sporadically, with service to the site itself still being rather spotty.
OpenBazaar co-founder Sam Patterson told CoinDesk the market has released four new versions based on lessons learned from the tests and expect at least one more before the final launch in "the next few weeks."
Not willing to wait for the release of a field-tested version of the software, a "handful of eager users" downloaded and ran the "mainnet version" of OpenBazaar at their own risk, according to this Reddit post, which Patterson verified.On 3rd March, the first OpenBazaar transaction for three "SuperBitcoiner" keychains was conducted between Shayan Eskandari, a […]
