My hot takes on all this:
  1. We were always able to get a small group of nerd enthusiasts interested in using bitcoin as a payment system, but that never scaled to more than a tiny group. "Normies" were never going to jump on board with that (and that actually includes a lot of loudly self-professed 'bitcoiners' who could never be bothered to actually use the thing).
  2. But ... Bitcoin was never a payment network, it was always a monetary network. The 2012-2014 excitement about getting bars to accept it was never the point. So ...
  3. Lightning network is the closest thing we have today to what could be a well designed payment network on top of Bitcoin. It's not 100% there yet and there are some deep structural issues related to security (DOS) and privacy (receiver) but it's at least conceivable we'll fix them, and today Lightning works very well (I use it a lot for online and even in person payments). OpenBazaar was way too early for that, but I think they maybe were in the set of people who grossly underestimated how promising it was in the 2017-18 era. The thing is, even if they had gone balls to the wall on LN they were way too early to take advantage; it was realistically 3+ years before mobile software had gotten good enough and reliable enough to use it. Even now, we are not quite at the userbase level for a big p2p trading market to develop, though it's a lot more realistic nowadays.
But aside from all that debate, trade of physical goods is a really tough market it seems like. That's why Bitrefill (and I guess paxful, though I haven't tried that) had the right idea: gift cards and phone refills are very uniquely genuinely valuable pure digital tradeable goods. The whole shipping thing is so problematic without huge economies of scale, forcing locality in something that intrinsically wants to be international, plus the trust issue of waiting for long periods.
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The UI was horrible, but easily fixable. Instead they spent all the efforts of Chris Pacia to include a lot of shitcoins, since "it cannot hurt to have payment alternatives." Well, it surely can if it takes away all the development resources.
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Chris was an extremely strong proponent of Bitcoin Cash and was a large reason we went past Bitcoin and supported it. We also decided to support some additional UTXO based currencies like LTC and Zcash. Eventually we wanted to also support ETH and ERC-20s. We wanted to capture as many potential users as possible. We didn’t discriminate against other coins. Chris wouldn’t have been working on Lightning or anything related because he was not a real supporter of it. It was also just not compatible with us to start building on. We would have had to build something similar to LNURL or Lightning Addresses and really gone all in on Bitcoin only and the team we had would not have gone for that either.
Lots of mistakes all around regardless.
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OK. Too bad. I liked the idea a lot and even bought some nice art on OpenBazaar. Then the problems with this spammer selling comic series which could not be blocked, having to deal with Tor manually and so on came. Hopefully something similar comes back. I think DeSnake of AlphaBay fame thinks along these lines.
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I never bought anything from openbazaar because there was nothing that I want on there.
Lightning Escrow is what OpenBazaar should have been. An escrow (and an index) is the main value prop of any online market.
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Here are his main post-mortem bits:
  1. People hate downloading desktop apps and creating great cross platform experiences is hard
First, we should have spent much more time on some kind of web version, or focused solely on mobile. We spent too much time building a complicated, high-maintenance desktop application. It was always clunky and unreliable and never really encapsulated the experience I had envisioned.
  1. Price volatility made people hesitant to accept Bitcoin as payment?
We should have also figured out a way to add stablecoin support for the marketplace. That would have created price stability and mitigated the volatility that inhibited people using the e-commerce platform.
  1. Everything can't be free
From a business perspective, we never charged users a fee for using the platform, which limited our revenue options and made it hard to operate at a profit or raise additional venture capital.
  1. Talk to your users
I think anyone interested in building a new decentralized P2P marketplace needs to think hard about who their end customers are. There’s a massive difference between a customer trying to send hard-to-find medicine across the world undetected to a loved one versus someone wanting to buy an inflatable pool for their kids. We didn’t make that distinction and fell into the trap of trying to out-engineer our problems. Sometimes listening to what your users need is what matters most.
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Simple Auctions and plebeian.market exist although aren't funded by vc's.
May be VC money is the actual rats poison?
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Top-down financing is antithetical to organic growth, which is the essence of life. Nobody got rich winning the lottery.
Money is certainly not a bad thing, but you have to also earn your place in the world before you ask for more.
Plebeian Market is much simpler in what it does compared to OpenBazaar, but we think that in the long run it'll get much further, exactly because we are hungry and foolish.
The fact that Brian Hoffman, after failing that, went on to build auctions on centralized blockchains is quite telling: he understands "decentralization" without understanding Decentralization. Decentralization starts with the plebs, from the roots.
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I prefer to think of it as fuel for a fire. If you have an un-contained fire and add a bunch of fuel, you are fucked.
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VC money for a nonprofit open-source commerce-facilitation project makes no sense to me. Where there is no revenue model, and all the organization's infrastructure can simply be forked and federated, a business formed to serve an ideology will not benefit from the positive feedback of market incentives. At least SN follows the Craigslist/television/newspaper/twitter/fb model of success, give-away the network-effect component, and sell marketing to companies wanting to piggyback on the service (jobs/ads). In this case the VC only prolongs the pain for the "guy with an idea" and misallocates social and human capital to people with technical know-how but no understanding of the other business activities required to bring a product to market. OB1 may have had a relatively successful technical development effort, but the necessary activities for precursors to product development and supporting activities of market research, market feedback, market realignment appear to have been short-circuited by angel-money and groupthink.
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I see an abundance of VC money as direct result of credit expansion. So the result is quite similar.
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VC funds are definitely Cantillon beneficiaries, but I don't think venture funding is necessarily bad.
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Yes, they are rat poison.
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Further discussion on OpenBazaar here:
Why did OpenBazaar Fail? #64012
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i miss bitmit
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Didn’t they run with Bcash at some point?
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Yes, Brian fucked up and was on the wrong side of the fork wars. They went full bcashtard.
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bcash was never the problem. the reality is that no one was ready to spend Bitcoin on arbitrary good at the level of fees we saw. The software was fairly rough to use in spite of our efforts and more importantly really no good business model to sustain ourselves. The fork wars had no real bearing other than to cause a lot of maximalists to hate on us for supporting other payment options.
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Hey Brian welcome to SN.
I can appreciate you had a nuanced situation with your team + investors + product market fit.
But let's not be naive...
Supporting bcash was aligning OB with a concerted attack on Bitcoin and the sovereignty of its users, many of whom were OB early adopters. Any built up loyalty + reputation you had from users like myself was lost.
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Bitcoin wasn’t created to make bitcoiners happy. It was for freedom of money. We weren’t as concerned about making Bitcoiners happy as making free trade a real thing.
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