Do basicaly tor hidden markets but without the illegal items? Great! I'm def. excited!
Ummm, not exactly.
See, this is an uncensored peer to peer marketplace. That means that anyone can do anything on it, and there isn't anyone with the ability to stop them. You, as the user, are responsible for applying the content filters to your portal. Don't want to see certain things? Turn them off. Done.
Also the other thing the previous posters seem to be failing to understand (perhaps on purpose? I'm starting to wonder about this place...) is that it is a truly decentralized service. No it's not going to be shut down like Silk Road. Silk Road was entirely centralized on a hidden server. Shutting it down meant finding the server. Open Bazaar connects peers directly. There is not a central server. If a peer gets shut down, his "storefront" simply becomes unavailable, while the rest of the marketplace is unaffected. If you have an understanding of torrents, and why they are resilient to shut down, then you will understand this model.
No you are not sending strangers bitcoin and hoping to receive goods without any consumer protections. There are escrow services built in with multisignature transactions. The buyer and the seller have input on which entity to use. Users have feedback ratings that are much more difficult to abuse than current centralized alternatives. These two things combined create a pretty consumer friendly environment for BOTH buyers and sellers. It's not impossible to be scammed, but a scammer would need to jump through a lot of hoops, and the person being scammed would have to make some deliberate poor choices in order for it to happen, and then the scammer would likely need to start a new identity and build reputation once more. Compared to services that already exist, I think the scammer would prefer to stick to those.
All of that is pretty awesome on it's own, but the icing on the cake is that both the payment method (bitcoin) and the peer to peer structure of the service mean there are little to no fees associated with buying, selling, or money transacting. This is huge. As anyone who sells a lot of goods on ebay or Amazon, etc. will tell you, there are fees on top of fees for everything you do, and depending on the value of what you're selling, some 10-30% of your sales could be going toward your operating costs. Without those barriers you can keep a lot more profit as a seller, or get things cheaper than they can realistically be offered anywhere else as a buyer. As a bonus, you have the option of not giving all your personal info to make a transaction.
