Get a Clear View of the Internet’s Freest Free Market!
We’ve just launched a new fair play app!
In case you’re new to the BlockStamp project, we’re building an ecosystem of these apps around the BlockStamp blockchain. They’re intended to make specific areas of the digital economy run more fairly and transparently.
We’ve already launched a radically fair alternative to traditional online casinos.
And now our latest app, the BlockStamp OpenBazaar Listing Explorer, is helping to make internet free trade truly free — without middlemen or arbitrary censorship.
Here’s some brief background and what you need to know to get started using it.
OpenBazaar is a peer-to-peer e-ecommerce platform.
The OpenBazaar platform has been around for a while and you can read all about it directly on their website and on Wikipedia.
But here’s our take on it.
The project has a lot going for it, namely:
- The platform is truly decentralized. To buy and sell products, users need to run the software on their own computers and interact directly amongst themselves, not via a profit-making intermediary. In mainstream e-commerce, these intermediaries are companies like eBay or Amazon. In non-mainstream e-commerce, i.e. darknet markets, these intermediaries are whoever is managing the platform and take a cut of transactions. (See OpenBazaar’s blog article discussing why it is not a darknet market.)
- The platform works. There are active users, i.e. you can run the software and actually buy and sell things with it.
- It’s technically possible to sell anything there. All the infrastructure is there for a truly free market. You can find mundane things like t-shirts and toys and plenty of things that are just plain weird. And of course consciousness-altering substances that Big Pharma and their pet lawmakers want you to use their equivalents of :)
But its full potential is untapped because:
The default listing explorer is censored and until now there haven’t been good alternatives.
To buy something on OpenBazaar, you need to know the address of the listing. It looks like this:
You might get such a link in any number of ways, e.g. from a friend or on a message board, etc. But the most likely way you’ll find such a link to something you want to buy is via an OpenBazaar listing explorer a.k.a. search engine.
The OpenBazaar development team has created one that is included in the platform by default — and it is censored not to show listings that some people might object to.
Fair enough. The team built a great product and they have their own reasons for deciding to censor their listing explorer.
But from a practical perspective, this censorship slows down adoption. Most users will buy their t-shirts, toys, etc. on mainstream e-commerce sites. They will come to OpenBazaar because it allows unrestricted trade in things that are more difficult to obtain elsewhere.
Fortunately, now you can use an uncensored OpenBazaar listing explorer.
If a seller has listed an item — any item — on the OpenBazaar platform, you can find it easily with the BlockStamp listing explorer.
Simply type in what you’re looking for and away you go.
After installing OpenBazaar on your computer, you have two ways of using the listing explorer.
First, you can use the online version available here. Just find a listing you want and click on its OpenBazaar link.
As outlined above, the link will look something like this:
That link will take you to the OpenBazaar platform where you can complete the purchase.
Second, you can add the listing explorer to the OpenBazaar platform itself.
Simply click on the “add search provider” button and enter the following URL:
https://bazaar.blockstamp.market/api/search
The explorer will be added automatically and you can use it to browse for listings within the application. After you find what you want to buy, you can also complete the purchase in the application.
Disclaimer: Technology is technology and laws are laws. Do you homework and be smart.
At BlockStamp, we advocate personal responsibility and making decisions for yourself.
Even so, government laws are a part of life as we know it. If laws are on the books, they can be enforced. It doesn’t matter who wrote them or paid for them to be written in a certain way.
The decentralized OpenBazaar software is not subject to any one government’s jurisdiction, but you probably are. Use the technology wisely!
Make sure you’re part of the BlockStamp social community and feel free to ask any questions there!
About BlockStamp:
BlockStamp is a multipurpose Bitcoin blockchain fork developed to promote liberty, transparency, and sovereignty in areas of the digital economy where these fundamental values are most at risk. BlockStamp hosts a radically fair gambling platform, a digital tool for transparently sealing data, a censorship-proof internet Domain Naming System, and the BST crypto coin.
