Post date: Jan 6, 2015 3:25:17 PM
OpenBazaar is decentralized P2P trading / market platform.
Some history and tech stuff about decentralized networking applications:
As I've said several times, I got really disappointed when PirateBay announced that reverse proxy technology is latest cloud / peer to peer networking stuff. I was expecting them to release a fully distributed version of PirateBay as portable multi-platform client application. If they follow the latest trends they could have used WebRTC compatible communication allowing the clients to run in modern web browsers in fully P2P fashion. I know some people don't remember eMule, but it actually provided search & listing functions from Kademlia (Kad) in fully distributed manner. So when people claim that Torrent's are so awesome, they're actually stepping back in time for old times. Centralized trackers is something that Even eDonkey 2000 (ed2k) and eMule got rid a long time ago. So it would be quite natural that the file sharing systems would work fully without any need for old fashioned web sites.
Flooding based networks would also work beautifully as mesh networking, even if connectivity is partially or mostly lost. As example Bitmessage would beautifully work like Firechat, same network could be relayed to 'local' peers over adhoc wlan, bluetooth, etc. So even if mobile networks are disturbed or what ever, as long as even one peer of local mesh got connection to the 'rest of world' it would relay messages and keep everyone connected.
Yet decentralized networks can be used as tool to attack other networks, if there are bugs in the client implementation. At one point ED2K's Kad had implementation problems. Peers having the lowest or hights peer ID received absolutely huge flood of traffic, because every peer on network was checking for. So the address space didn't properly wrap around to full circle. I had 10 megabit connection back then, and I got totally DDoSed out of the network after setting peer id to all 00s or FFs. Well, I'm sad for the users who didn't realize this issue and suffered from it without ability to manually change peers DHT address. I'm also the guy who told Overnet / ED2K designers that it's better to select rarest block for download, instead always selecting randomly any available needed available block. This radically reduced number of cases where there were just a few missing blocks for a huge file preventing complete availability.
Then a few thoughts about OpenBazaar, I checked it's source.
I hope good luck and success for projects like OpenBazaar. I've thought writing my on P2P application(s) for several years. But I haven't yet found a good reason. Maybe it would be time to write fully mobile light secure P2P application without any centralized peers except boot strap service. But as far as I know, Wire should be something like that.
As I've written several times, decentralization, mesh and P2P are just bad for mobile platforms, because those consume CPU time, Network bandwidth and generally drain battery on battery operated devices. On severs and desktops normal P2P networks work without any problems, but on mobile platforms it's a whole different story.
If you want to comment or talk about anything, just mail me. I'll be glad to discuss anything.