…and one of the main reasons for that is security & privacy - so many big name hacks so far, just wait till regular people start getting hurt via banking, finance etc
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Ahead of the curve as usual, it seems Finland will be the first to put this into practice next year.
I can see this as a catalyst for brain drain between countries as individuals follow passion before money…it’s the natural state of humans really.
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OB is not even trying to be anonymous. IP addresses of participants can be learned and there’s no attempt to provide Darknet-level of privacy and anonymity. The emphasis is on getting regular buyers and sellers on board.
That’s a bizarre statement. Before your comment they tied the top spot for the most private bitcoin wallet.
Which is very good, because there’s money to be spent on developing the software. If it turns out to be so good to have people willing to part with their money in order to profit more using the software, power to them.
If it does what you think it’ll do, it’s going to be an epic fail.
What it seems to be doing is different and that is along the lines of what Milton Freedman argued for which is eliminate the bloated social state apparatus and replace it with one-off payout without increasing redistribution (payouts). So the average freeloader will receive more or less the same.
Back to OB: the latest s/w (they started rewriting it last summer) is also released under the MIT license, so anyone can fork it in a very flexible way which is another reason to rejoice the fact that private investors are paying for its development while giving the s/w away.
And finally, the Syscoin document states that OB isn’t free because they charge a fee. That’s complete nonsense, the fee never (in the old or the current version) existed. P2P payments are possible and even when a moderator is optionally selected it can be anyone, charging any fee. (And if you like humor, check out their bug bounty program - they pay $15 per security bug. 
)
My understanding of the MIT license is that there is no obligation for them or anyone else using that code to share what they create. In which case your statement is incorrect, and their privately funded development is likely to stay private, and that’s why they chose MIT.
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Okay we’re getting off-topic here, but these aren’t the first off topic comments on this thread (Finland, Syscoin, what-have-ya)…
If they redistribute the s/w, that’s where the difference kicks in. MIT: can be closed source as long as the original license is attached. GPL: can’t redistribute modified binaries without the source or instructions on how to modify it.
The source is out there updated in real time (there are no 2 repositories, public and corporate or something like that):
And (for the curious since this was a big topic at the time) the component they coded themselves when MaidSafe wouldn’t license theirs is available under a more permissive (MIT) license: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/txrudp/blob/master/LICENSE.
They could have taken - if MaidSafe licensed thart part of their code under the MIT license - the MaidSafe code, improved it and not disclose it. But they could have done that under the existing license. If they wanted to redistribute the code, with the MIT license for MaidSafe code they could have potentially released their improvements as closed source binary and maybe have another open source “lite” version. GPL prevents that, so they coded their own.
Now whether they’ll have a “lite” and “pro” version of their own packages, I don’t know, but it also doesn’t matter - anyone can take their current MIT licensed code, make modifications and release those under the GPL license.
Long story short what has been released by OB is already available for anyone’s use using a more permissive MIT license. In the future they theoretically could develop multiple versions, but so can MaidSafe (and commercial licensing was available last time I checked). Furthermore nothing prevents MaidSafe from licensing the code under any (including closed source) license which is what (I think) @smacz pointed out somewhere and that is MaidSafe gets copyright on all contributions which lets them re-license such code under a license of their choosing.
Edit: @smacz pointed out it wasn’t him who commented on licensing and indeed it was zankfrappa - I was able to find the post here: LICENSING: Are you dead set on GPL3? - #180 by zankfrappa
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Thanks for the extra info @janitor.
Given OB’s need to make money for investors, I think we can expect this will be a priority in their choices regarding what they do or don’t share of their code.
This is why people choose the MIT license after all, while others choose GPL in order to put free (freedom to use, build on etc) ahead of profit.
Profit is still allowed with GPL, but it allows it to be made secondary to other priorities more easily: as you mention, MaidSafe can still license the GPL code for closed source use, but only in return for fees they can use for the good of the charitable Foundation, which holds the rights (and the majority of shares in MaidSafe).
BTW I think the licensing is relevant to understanding the juxtaposition of these two brilliant projects.
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Its not one off. Freedman has been debunked in many ways, we tried his austerity stuff for the last 45 years and it doesn’t work.The true free market stuff is as much a red herring as untried communism. There is no way around it, both Labor and Capital are obsolete. This was known to the economic profession 45 years ago and they told the policy profession and in an effort to save capital we’ve had the incredible stupidity of a slide into ever increasing austerity. You don’t get the pay off of automation and then try to go back to the plantation… This is our collective inheritance we have to use it instead of getting in fights over mindless accounting games. Why is violence increasing against a nuclear back drop (?) Easy, austerity and lead in the gas where it applied.
Sidenote: the guy is called Friedman… But I guess you both know what you’re talking about…
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This is openBazzar: Local web server <—> Other Local Web servers.
If Using Safe:
Local Web server uses safe db to store listings…etc. Other local web servers pull that data from safe db with api calls. This way, persistent servers are not necessary, as local web servers(with some ability to communicate between eachother) are no longer pulling data from eachother.
Or something like that.
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Excuse my ignorance, but is it the case that Open Bazaar can be freely forked or does their licence prohibit this? If not, then fine, if it can, then would it be a massive dev job to achieve compatability with Safe? Is it simpler to build an Exchange from scratch, specifically for Safe - as with Safex perhaps?
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There licence is MIT i think which is less restrictive than GNU. You can fork it and make it closed source or open source. You could probably take the front end design but build the back-end from scratch.
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I’m intrigued to see what happens with a base income. At first blush I don’t believe it will work. How can it logically work? It seems you would always end up with a form of hyper-inflation. The supply will always be more than the demand. Prices of goods should increase as more people are demanding them. Like you asked @Seneca where does the income come from if not taxes (if taxes is the plan then we are talking a form of socialism) and why would I keep a highly inflationary currency when/if (IF is probably more likely) I could exchange for something that stores value. I’m really hoping SafeCoin’s inflation is slow and dispersed as more and more people come online. I know this is off topic from the OP so do with it what you will moderators 
One positive in BIGs is the lack of strings associated with the income… But seeing the income will soon be worth less (and eventually worthless) have we not just created a system of dependence that can’t be fixed. I see a lot of red flags. Perhaps I’m wrong…
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I am also unsure how it can work, but I’m clear that I don’t know enough to believe strongly one way or the other. I’ve heard that the principle is to spend the same amount as now, but removing the bureaucracy means you can spend more of what is collected. It is also designed to only give subsistence, food & shelter, so there’s incentive to work - both so you can have some extras, and because even a small extra wage makes a difference. More than now because firstly, the basics are already paid for, and earnings don’t reduce the basic income you receive - this means there’s a strong incentive for low paid people to work which is not currently the case. In the UK now, people in low paid jobs have to work very hard, doing difficult jobs for little money, which doesn’t cover the basics for many.
Those receiving welfare are not better off really. Partly because the system is punitive, demeaning and not something most people would go through if they had an alternative. I know this because I’ve heard from people exactly what they’ve experienced of it.
But even if it wasn’t such an ordeal to obtain benefits it still doesn’t work well. People only get it because they really need it now, and when they do start to earn more, much of that is taken away as benefits reduce. This is one of the traps that a basic income can change.
So there are arguments for, although I haven’t looked into this properly, or seen how it’s worked so far. I think it’s a very interesting experiment.
Regarding the cryptocurrency / taxation issue that @Seneca raises, there are people already trying to solve that. Take a look at resilience for example - using a genetic algorithm approach based around something called taxemes to voluntarily generate funds for a universal basic income.
Another solution would be through inflation of the currency - this is what Martin Armstrong proposes as a replacement for taxation - with a cap on how much money the government can print. If a UBI based on this were to prove more effective than means tested welfare (less waste on bureaucracy, more effective incentives to work, improved mental and physical health for the low paid), there’s no reason why this should by hyper inflationary. It might create more growth, raising the cap (which would be based on GDP if I remember correctly).
Anyway, definitely interesting!
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They were aiming for anonymity when they initially forked DarkMarket. I surmise they have to take a regulation-compliant approach because of private investors.
I believe the article you are referring to also mentions it wasn’t completed. It assumes all the stated features of DarkWallet would be implemented. As far as I still know, the project is dead.
No objections to venture capitalism. All for it. The statement needs to be put back into the context of the discussion – namely, investors expect a return (and rightfully so) and will not agree to GPL open source licensing which maidsafe falls under because everything derived from it would also need to be free to use. It’s why OpenBazaar does not want to integrate with SAFE – they need a return for their investors.
A group of people, such as random participants from this forum, can fork OB code right now, and create a version that works with MaidSafe (in its present version). There’s nothing that OB investors can do about that.
I already mentioned so sorry for repeating, but it didn’t get through it seems, t’s not impossible the OB1 investors (the company that develops OB) will ask them to start creating closed source code, but until then anything that’s being released can be used any way - even for closed source service - by anyone, including MaidSafe Inc. or a group of people from this forum.
(The opposite is not possible (that OB1 uses SAFE code to provide a closed source for-profit service; MaidSafe is licensed under GPLv3 which requires anyone to provide modifications even when they are not distributed - it is enough to provide network services with such code for the person who made changes to have to release modifications made to it).)
This isn’t my opinion on what is better or right, just an explanation of how MIT and GPLv3 licensing works.
Don’t know where you thought I am unclear about GPL vs. MIT. Here’s my original post:
To paraphrase: OB Investors will likely build sellable private apps on top of OB so they can make a profit even though OB is open source under MIT (or non-GPL). They have first movers advantage with the apps because they are the ones writing the code for OB and will understand it before anyone else when it is fully released. If they integrated OB with SAFE, they could not profit from the apps because of SAFE’s GPL license.
This is wrong. We’ve had this discussion before too I think, about what can and can’t be done with each of these licences. So here I am again correcting you on something you surely know to be incorrect.
It’s wrong on two counts:
- firstly, OB can negotiate with MaidSafe to obtain a licence to improve on and use SAFEnetwork code without disclosing their changes. But they don’t need to because…
- it is not necessary for them to have such a licence in order to build their application on SAFEnetwork, only if they want to modify the libraries for their own use (say a fork of the network).
So OB can almost certainly build on SAFEnetwork, and keep their source code closed if they choose. Anyone can.
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You’re right, under a different (most likely commercial) license they could use SAFE code with private modifications that wouldn’t have to be disclosed.
I was referring to permissionless, cost-free approaches.
It is also true that OB could build their own code “on” SAFE (as app developers do), but in terms of changing the source code permissionless use would happen based upon the licenses under which each software is released now.
@Tungsvard, okay, all clear.
Still, they cannot abuse that because the released code can be forked by a less greedy or more valuable group of people. If they deliver value, buyers and sellers will stick around, if not, the project will die or morph/be forked into something else. By definition they must provide move value (or lower prices for comparable service) than eBay or others, so I hope they manage to survive.
It’s just a couple of guys who all work on the code, there are no “CEO” types there (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just saying it’s a frugal group of people most of who could probably make more money doing “usual” day jobs).
So was I in the second bullet. Either way, what you said originally was incorrect. To be correct, you should have explained that there was the possibility of doing this by negotiating a licence. That you didn’t bother, and again had to be corrected even though you knew this…
Moderation: Do you see why this is a problem, and why I’ve asked you to respond to this point in the thread yesterday? I think we need to clear this up.
I’m not clear what you mean by the rest of this paragraph. It seems to imply the same incorrect position you stated in the first place. I refer you to the second bullet point in my correction: which is permissionless and allows OB to build a closed source app.
I have not heard this perspective. Can you elaborate or link to where you previously elaborated?