Are you concerned at all about legal ramifications of OpenBazaar? It seems like if you guys succeed, you're going to have to deal with lots of illegal transactions. Are you able or willing to work with law enforcement in these cases?
They have to tread very, very carefully here. I seem to remember early demo screenshots with weed as a sample product. Not exactly a good call.
There's a reason all the piracy tools show things like Big Buck Bunny downloading, playing, etc. You may want the illegal uses to be present on the service - I don't blame them I like the anarchic feeling of it and the lack of regulation that is possible in the system, it's beautiful in a way - but you can't go around advertising it for law breaking purposes, condoning that kind of thing will just get you screwed too.
Weed is actually a perfect example of the utility of this platform. The sale of recreational marijuana is legal in some US states and other parts of the world. The main hurdle for online retailers of controversial industries is the lack of support from financial institutions. The same problem can manifest itself indirectly with any service a business relies on.
If you build a commerce platform on top of old infrastructure, you will be subject to old social and moral constraints. To build a truly free commerce platform you have to start from scratch.
" The sale of recreational marijuana is legal in some US states and other parts of the world. The main hurdle for online retailers of controversial industries is the lack of support from financial institutions."
The reason why many financial institutions don't accept Marijuana related clients is not because they don't want to its because they can't by law. In the USA, Marijuana is still illegal at a federal level. This is the same reason why you can't ship weed products in the post. State lines.
I have a client who's in the medical Marijuana industry so I have to deal with some issues relating to all of this.
Banks that don't cross state lines often do accept such customers (i.e credit unions).
Right. The current solution is to trust local services will continue to support your business's activities. That trust represents a risk that can be avoided by building on top of a decentralized infrastructure for payments and hosting.
Yeah, the kind of person who's alerted of this tech's criminal potential by pictures of weed etc., rather than knowing about it through other means, isn't the type of person you would feel safe conducting an illegal transaction with.
One would expect that devs would be unable to assist law enforcement. Except to say that it's hopeless. That's pretty much what Tor Project says. Maybe that's just BS, of course. But one can hope.
An official statement from OpenBazaar devs would be good.
Yeah, one would hope that cooperation with law enforcement would be hopeless. Otherwise the decentralised nature of OB, and its impartiality, would be called into question.
