I’m a huge fan of new technologies. I don’t mean a hundred-core phone from some obscure East Asian company. I mean technologies that push us forward, things like BitTorrent, Tor, Maelstrom, blockchain, DeepMind, and free networks. Amid the hype where everyone’s become a miner or trader, it might be better to explore the background of these technologies and understand their impact on life and the future.

OpenBazaar is an exciting and unusual project, a free market for buying and selling anything. According to their website, it started at a hackathon in Toronto, Canada, called Dark Market, by Amir Taaki (and he won that hackathon). That wasn’t his first or last unconventional project, and he’s done plenty of other unusual work. What we deal with today is a project forked from Dark Market by Brian Hoffman, named OpenBazaar.

Since Dark Market was licensed under AGPL (one of the strictest licenses in free software), Brian Hoffman’s team rewrote the entire system from scratch, leaving no original code in OpenBazaar. The first version was released on April 4, 2016, and the second on November 1, 2017, under the MIT license. Investments made in OpenBazaar helped the project become more serious and realistic.

OpenBazaar isn’t the first of its kind. Earlier projects like NashX and its spin-off Bitmarkets introduced the idea of decentralized stores, but OpenBazaar is much more comprehensive and accessible.

OpenBazaar (also on GitHub) is a decentralized peer-to-peer system (or more precisely, a marketplace). There’s no central server and no control over communications; connections occur directly between users (or more precisely, buyers and sellers). All data belongs to you, all transactions are conducted with trusted cryptocurrencies, and exchanges are completely secure. No fees are taken from buyers or sellers, and the entire system is completely free and open.

I think it’s a good opportunity to talk about other related topics. My feelings toward these technologies are a mix of excitement and fear. For someone like me, who’s used to looking at every problem from every possible angle, the freedoms created by such systems are double-edged. I don’t know how much you’ve explored the dark web, but this freedom that lets you sell your useless second-hand items can also be used by others to auction off the body parts of a victim or torture a child. Not all people are good. My point is: we need to understand what we’re doing, consider the different facets of every action and its effects, and watch the bridges we leave behind.