Great thread on this here: #38688

@brianhoffman even chimes in

Here's a post from 2018 on HackerNews with an AMA:

OpenBazaar 2.0, powered by IPFS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702684

My opinion, ... OB needed a full capability mobile app and it needed a web front-end (to at least search and browse). It also needed something done so that performance using the client (browse, and search) wasn't so terribly slow. OB might have had a window, if it was a couple years earlier, where it might have found a user base (both vendors and consumers) that would have stuck with them while figuring out a solution after on-chain fees spiked.

But once there was the ability to accept bitcoin for payment on Shopify, and also when BTCPay Server came out, there was much less of a reason for vendors to sell on a marketplace like OB.

Vendors want buyers, and OB simply didn't result in any decent volume for the few vendors who tried. Without real vendors, generally the only vendors remaining using OB were doing so because they weren't welcome on eBay and Amazon. So you had a lot of weird stuff, which makes a curious normie get turned off from OB. So the catch-22 (few vendors resulted in few consumers, and few consumers resulted in few vendors) was never resolved.

Even today, there aren't really any bitcoin-related online marketplaces that are finding much traction anywhere.

Following is a copy pasta of the Marketplaces section of an article on my blog. Looks like I need to update that -- some of them are now defunct.

Like hundreds of early businesses focused on Bitcoin, mine included, OB's team fell for the classic trap of building on bitcoin while assuming that it was already a finished monetary network.

It wasn't. Not without lightning. Not only did the fees in 2016-2017 balloon up to make it unusable, but the blocktime confirmation delays made it unweildy for commerce. We DESPERATELY needed lightning but few fully realized that yet...

Sadly, Brian had a team full of altcoiners, expecially Chris Pacia, who was a Bcasher. Unable to wait for Lightning to take off, they went the route of optimizing for shitcoins and that made the entire bitcoin community exile the project.

Now that lightning is ready, we just need someone to pick this great project up and run with it: https://github.com/OpenBazaar

I remember how it started, it was initially developed by Amir Taaki, an anarchist, with the clear goal of becoming something like a decentralised Silk Road.

Getting it to run was quite an ordeal, the UX was horrible and never seemed to improve. Although it started as a Bitcoin only, they later added altcoin support and even decided to introduce their own coin.

In hindsight, I think it was one of these projects that fail, partially not because the idea is bad, but because they are too much ahead of their time, way before the market's ready. Someone might pick it up later, improve the product and the business model and make billions with it.

With Lightning now being functional, the project and business model need a new and fresh approach.

It wasn't using Nostr.

it required a dedicated desktop client and it is much easier to use a web browser (even tor browser) and directly access a darknet market

no one wants to install a dedicated client just to shop in a "decentralized manner"

everything needs to be browser accessible because changing behavior by asking users to install an app is unfortunately a big barrier to entry unless there is some other incentive at place. And for open bazaar besides for buying a bunch of garbage, only the ideological used it. There were no incentives to install the app. And no incentives to buy there vs ebay.

Incentives always beat ideology

I declare that OPenbazaar is still alive, but version 2.0 is hard to use, we are working on version 3.0. It will be released in November. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/x4qy1y/the_demo_of_version_30/ ，

It switched for using shitcoin.

Cuz Brian hoffman was affiliated with shitcoiners 😛jk. Check out honeyroad.store pretty sure it uses lightning

I believe many of the developers went the altcoin route. I don't think they ever made the UI very appealing either.

+500 sats. Also interested to know.