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144 sats \ 2 replies \ @Coinosphere 29 Aug 2022 \ on: Why did OpenBazaar Fail? bitcoin
Like hundreds of early businesses focused on Bitcoin, mine included, OB's team fell for the classic trap of building on bitcoin while assuming that it was already a finished monetary network.
It wasn't. Not without lightning. Not only did the fees in 2016-2017 balloon up to make it unusable, but the blocktime confirmation delays made it unweildy for commerce. We DESPERATELY needed lightning but few fully realized that yet...
Sadly, Brian had a team full of altcoiners, expecially Chris Pacia, who was a Bcasher. Unable to wait for Lightning to take off, they went the route of optimizing for shitcoins and that made the entire bitcoin community exile the project.
Now that lightning is ready, we just need someone to pick this great project up and run with it: https://github.com/OpenBazaar
Agree with this accounting.
There is limited, but definitely not zero, demand for this kind of thing. Towards the end of the project's lifetime they actually set up a mobile app, which is probably the last piece making it viable.
Whether it's viable as a business I'm not convinced at all, but as a protocol for casual p2p commerce it may well be, now we have a mature Lightning network (though it will emphatically only get used for niches here and there, not like it's going to replace Amazon et al.).
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It never could have been a viable business, even if there was more buyer & seller demand... That's the nature of decentralized markets.
But I still hold out hope that one day that code will be in use instead of dark markets after someone brushes it off and adds the Lightning Network & TOR by default to it.
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