Just noticed there is some activity in this thread, so I wanted to answer these questions...
So ~1.5 years later... what exactly is still missing that OpenTransactions can finally take off?
Open-Transactions itself is fully-functional.
What's still missing is the
voting pools (using multi-sig to prevent the OT server from stealing any Bitcoins transacted there.)
However, Monetas is hard at work building the voting pools...
You can read updates on the Monetas blog:
http://monetas.net/blog/Design info for voting pools has started popping up on the OT wiki:
http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php/Voting_Pool_Deposit_ProcessOnce voting pools are ready, it should "take off," as you say. It will take a few more months.
If you look at some of the videos on OpenTransactions, FellowT mentions that different encryption methods can be used for messaging and Bitmessage is one being used, at least that is my understanding
Here's the latest video update:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJKWDC4q5rAAs you can see from the video, we are agnostic to the exact transport method, with Bitmessage being only the first integration.
However, Bitmessage
is now fully-integrated and working in the Moneychanger desktop client! (As of the past couple months, as shown in the video.)
Now that we have Bitmessage integrated, we can start adding the features described in this thread, such as cross-server discovery for trading, legacy bank integration, etc. (And of course, the Bazaar feature.)
Fair enough, and I am not here to compare either. I believe there is more to OT than you say, and its Bazaar feature is what I am talking about, which is to market and sell physical products. Using multisig and bitmessage.
To be clear: Bitmessage is
not integrated into OT itself. Rather, it's integrated in the Moneychanger desktop client.
Similarly, the Bazaar will
not be built into OT itself. Rather, it's now being built into the Moneychanger desktop client. Here is some of the design info:
http://opentransactions.org/forum/index.php?topic=3821.0The basic concept is to have decentralized markets for goods and services, sort of like e-Bay, except without the server. Like a P2P version of e-Bay.
To whatever degree we have inspired any other projects, that's great! Let's change the world.