link to original reddit post by /u/ihaphleas
TLDR: OpenBazaar is dead, long live ZeroBazaar (once we make it)!
OpenBazaar was an attempt to make a "distributed" eBay where one could pay in Bitcoin. It was a good first step, but suffered from a few problems.
- Stores were only visible when the owner's server was actually up and running. This is fine for a full-time merchant, but not for part-time.
- Apparently the search wasn't great. I'm not sure if I never found anything I wanted because the search was bad, or because there simply weren't enough users.
- The only method of payment (that I recall) was Bitcoin (BTC). I'm okay with the way BTC is developing, but it's certainly not a p2p digital cash network at the moment. Buyers and sellers need to be able to choose their medium of exchange.
What is ZeroNet? ZeroNet is a distributed peer-to-peer network based on both blockchain and bittorrent technology. Peers download, and then serve to other peers, the sites (zites) that they visit (one can also exclude or limit sites).
This means each site is "hosted" on a swarm of other peers.
ZeroNet can also be run through Tor. The peer-to-peer, encrypted and Tor capabilities of ZeroNet mean that it is very censorship resistant.
Back to "ZeroBazaar." Hosting a store on ZeroNet would simply mean creating a zite with the various goods and services one offers ... and this store would stay available even when the owner wasn't personally serving the zite.
"ZeroBazaar" could simply be a zite with a large collection of store zites --- categorized, rated, searchable, etc. ... with a collection of store zite templates as well.
If any of you already have ZeroNet installed, you can check out this start of a "classifieds" zite: http://127.0.0.1:43110/1ADVERTvh1AC7XhDBBkaEhL5wGkMuS9fwt/