In light of the recent takedowns of three top tier Dark Net Markets, many vendors, customers, and market operators find themselves scratching their heads searching for alternatives.
Enter Openbazaar 2.0.
On January 18th OpenBazaar released their Milestone 1 Developer Release of OpenBazaar 2.0, a new version of the software which is built on the decentralized InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The new version of OpenBazaar includes long awaited privacy features, such as support for Tor.
[https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/03/04/openbazaar-finally-integrates-tor/]
Several subsequent alpha versions have been released. You can keep abreast of news at their blog.
Why OpenBazaar?
- There is no central "OpenBazaar server" for LEOs to shutdown. Instead, stores are distributed across many nodes, in much the way that a Bittorrent works.
- No exit scams - you never have to store you bitcoins (or other cryptocurrencies) on someone else's server (unless you decide to use escrow, in which case you and the person you're transacting with get to choose which escrow agent to use). The bitcoin can remain on your hard drive until the point where you actually transact.
If you want to help the development of OB 2.0 along, consider making targeted contributions ("bounties") for to reward developers for fixing specific issues. This way, you can also encourage the project to prioritize the features you consider important.
Here's a simple tutorial for how to create a bounty on an issue:
Go the issues list for one of the Openbazaar projects: here and here.
Click on one of the issues. Example:
Copy the URL for that issue from your address bar:
Go to https://www.bountysource.com and paste the URL you copied into the circled field then click "Post":
Select the amount of the bounty you wish to create, then follow the instructions you are shown.
Your support is critical-- placing your bounties lets all the developers working on this project know what issues you, the user, consider important!