I incline to agree with Wired. OpenBazaar is gonna end up as a DarkMarket. A marketplace without centralization is nothing but a scammer's heaven and drug dealer's den.
Hmm, why does this sound so familiar?
Ahhh yes, it's exactly the same way the media framed the internet back in the mid 90s. Here's the first paragraph from a New York Times article on the internet from 1996:
Big Brothers Abound In Virtual New World"Unregulated and unpoliced, the Internet resembles a Wild West frontier town without a sheriff.
Con artists have turned to the Internet, on-line services and electronic bulletin boards to promote bogus stock offerings and other dubious investment opportunities such as gold mining, gemstones and ostrich farming. The Internet also lends itself to marketing scams known as pyramid schemes, in which a few participants get rich and the vast majority get burned.
(...)
It can discover your name, E-mail address, location, the kind of computer and browser you are using and other sites you have visited — and much more detailed information besides.
"Although it may not seem like it, someone is following you through cyberspace," the center says. "Every time you retrieve a file, view an image, send an E-mail message or jump to a new web site, a record is created somewhere on the Net."
Source:
New York Times archives You know, that last part is actually true. Although I somehow doubt the author would have wrote it in such a scathing way if he knew that stranger watching you online was a government agent violating your constitutionally-protected right to privacy.
The moral of the story, kids, is that establishment sources are always afraid of the new thing, they will always demonize it. Why? Because shock and scare stories get views, they make the money.
