Last week I spoke with Mr. Knuckle, the developer of the decentralized market “NXT FreeMarket.” Now I’m pleased to interview Angel Leon and Brian Hoffman, developers of “OpenBazaar,” another disruptive decentralized market.
Ferdinand Reyes: First of all, can you explain to me which are the possibilities and how OpenBazaar works?
Angel Leon: It wasn’t until the birth of Bitcoin that electronic decentralized commerce was possible.
In July 2001 the fall of Napster gave birth to a revolution in peer to peer file sharing, the technology sector learned the dangers of censorship and several peer to peer file sharing protocols were born: Gnutella, Fast Track, eDonkey, Direct Connect and ultimately BitTorrent.
The peer to peer file sharing community always knew that peer to peer could do a lot more than just file sharing – it was always the dream, being able to let people trade digital goods in a distributed fashion just the way people were free to trade files – but this wasn’t possible until the Blockchain technology was created.
Now we have peer to peer cash, and a few years later Bitcoin evolved to support multisignature transactions, which can be used for different purposes, most importantly for escrow transactions.
All the pieces were now in place to put together the first decentralized market place in the world. For the first time in history, it will be possible for any two people in the planet to trade with one another without depending on any institution: all they will need is an app, and they will do the trading using electronic contracts which we call “Smart Contracts” that can allow the parties involved to enforce agreements electronically.
The most simple agreement there is is the purchase of goods, but this is just the beginning. New templates for more advanced contracts are being designed by the OpenBazaar team and it will be possible to do things like Insurance Policies, P2P Insurance (think now that instead of getting insurance from one provider, you could have thousands of underwriters distributing your risk in very small chunks), Crowdlending, Crowdfunding, P2P renting (decentralized Uber, decentralized AirBnb), Whole sellers trading directly with retailers across the world and being able to find each other and transact without incurring listing fees or currency exchange inneficiencies making global trade more efficient than ever, or simply being able to list and sell anything you’d want to sell to others just by using an app.
Never in the history of mankind has commerce been as convenient and direct. If we suceed, we’re not just transforming ecommerce, we’re transforming commerce as a whole.
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/18782/decentralized-markets-kills-e-commerce-stars-openbazaar/
Topic: Decentralized Markets Kills E-commerce Stars: OpenBazaar (Read 493 times)
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