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Open Bazaar integration - pre-proposal

Is it impossible to fix price in BTC and automatically index price in Dash based on an average API call from a few exchanges?

Of course it's possible, but what's the point, if parties want to transact in a different currencies?

For Alice to pay in Dash and Bob receive BTC, there should be a Carol, that would take Dash and send BTC. For Bob paying in BTC and Alice receiving Dash only, there should be a Carol, that would take BTC and send out Dash. You can't remove Carol otherwise, but prohibiting Alice and Bob to transact. And by removing their ability to transact, you will kill at least 99% of transactions. Thus Dash-only version of OB would be dead on arrival.

I understand your idea of not wanting to fund integration with Carol out of Dash funds. Problem is that every other currency community would think the same way. So, the fastest way to get Dash in the OB is to get Carol, I mean shapeshift or openbazaar to fund this integration. As soon as I'll get a free minute, I'll contact them, though I doubt that a cold contact would work.
 
No, you've got it totally backwards! I never suggested a Dash only independent version of OB

Bob sells in either BTC or Dash, up to him. Buyers buy in either Dash or BTC, up to them. Dash has an added feature os privacy and anonymity, that's the incentive, and instantX, but in OB setting it's not so critical even for digital downloads. To each his own!

If Bob sells in Dash but gets payed in BTC, then it's up to him if he wants to liquidate through an exchange or shapeshift or whatever. Bob may even have a feature to only sell in Dash if he so wishes, but that would be a little limiting as a merchant.

Maybe he could sell with BTC a little more expensive to incentivise Dash payments? That's what I would do.

Again, all I am defending is usage of funds for developing stuff that will benefit other coins, and instantly create downward pressure for use due to Eth and LTC having much higher marketcap.

Ok buddy, seriously, please don't take this the wrong way! I do want to see this happen. Everyone knows I've been screaming for OB since forever!

I'll leave now, best of luck

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Bob sells in either BTC or Dash, up to him. Buyers buy in either Dash or BTC, up to them

My point is that if that won't be integrated into a single-click experience, it won't be used.

Re usage of funds - I've got it and totally understand your point. I will contact OB and shapeshift teams to see if they're interested in funding this shapeshift plugin. If anyone can give me a warm lead - would be great.
 
My point is that if that won't be integrated into a single-click experience, it won't be used.

Re usage of funds - I've got it and totally understand your point. I will contact OB and shapeshift teams to see if they're interested in funding this shapeshift plugin. If anyone can give me a warm lead - would be great.

Absolutely, direct to the source!

openbazaar.slack.com - they are very welcoming! Please do report back, I'd love to see this happen!

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I strongly feel that the best thing for the widespread adoption of Dash, would be a Dash-only version of OpenBazaar...maybe "DashBazaar" would be a good name. A truly anonymous coin, on a truly anonymous platform.

I am sure everyone is aware of the huge boost Bitcoin got as a result of its use on the Silk Road - which I would remind everyone was not only used for illegal activity. "DashBazaar" would be even better for Dash than the Silk Road was for Bitcoin: The Silk Road could be shut down, but DashBazaar could not. It could eventually come bundled with the Dash wallet client, so with one download one gets the wallet to keep funds, as well as an anonymous peer-to-peer marketplace.

Of course, there would be countless comparisons between the Silk Road and DashBazaar...and while the association with illegal activity might not be savory, it certainly did not hurt the price of Bitcoin. I am simply being pragmatic here. Why does everyone else seem to favor a multi-coin solution? Why not highlight the truly anonymous nature of Dash, on a truly anonymous marketplace.?
 
There's no point developing dash-only solution, because it will work only for between dash buyers and dash sellers. If there's 10% of dash buyers and 10% of dash sellers on the OB network, then, on average, their transactions would be just 1% of the network transactions.

I see this from a different (future) perspective. If Bitcoin's capacity continues to be strangled, and there is some easy way for buyers and sellers to accept Dash, every OB buyer and seller will have to start thinking "Hmmm, should I continue to fight with Bitcoin, or should I try Dash? It's more private and has instant transactions, maybe it will work better?"

I do see your point that in terms of actual commerce, this will probably be – at first – next to useless, and (as you have explained) it really needs some currency exchange to be of practical commercial value. This is no different than using eBay: if I want to buy a t-shirt from the US shipped to Europe, I take advantage of my card provider making the currency exchange, I don't need to find a seller who accepts my local currency. To maximise Dash usage, OB will need an equivalent exchange built in.

Perhaps it is back-to-front, but while I accept the value of Dash-Bitcoin exchange in OB, I would rather spend my own time on adding native Dash support to OB, even though it will do very little for Dash commerce in the short term. However, it will be good publicity for Dash in the short term, like the soda machine. More importantly, if Bitcoin vs other cryptos hits a tipping point (say Bitcoin drops to <50% total market cap and still has a crippled blockchain), Dash will be sitting there to mop up. It's a big gamble, because it will take a lot of work, and it will only pay off in one scenario in a highly uncertain future, but then everything about Dash is a gamble right now.

I am estimating that this strategy will be a lot of effort and has a low probability of success, but I'm also estimating the payoff is high enough to justify the bet.
 
I strongly feel that the best thing for the widespread adoption of Dash, would be a Dash-only version of OpenBazaar...maybe "DashBazaar" would be a good name. A truly anonymous coin, on a truly anonymous platform.

I am sure everyone is aware of the huge boost Bitcoin got as a result of its use on the Silk Road - which I would remind everyone was not only used for illegal activity. "DashBazaar" would be even better for Dash than the Silk Road was for Bitcoin: The Silk Road could be shut down, but DashBazaar could not. It could eventually come bundled with the Dash wallet client, so with one download one gets the wallet to keep funds, as well as an anonymous peer-to-peer marketplace.

Of course, there would be countless comparisons between the Silk Road and DashBazaar...and while the association with illegal activity might not be savory, it certainly did not hurt the price of Bitcoin. I am simply being pragmatic here. Why does everyone else seem to favor a multi-coin solution? Why not highlight the truly anonymous nature of Dash, on a truly anonymous marketplace.?

I think you are right. We don't want to suffer the same fate as betamax because we didn't want to be associated with naughty stuff. But the reality is, it can't be the job of the core developers to create this type of tool.

They have a public profile and probably don't want to be associated with a project like that.

They also have their hands full creating 12.1 and evo.

Maybe someone else in the community will create it.
 
Ok, we can go other way around: create dash-only OB fork and then add multicurrency capabilities there. I'm not sure it's better from startup point of view, but I agree with you - it will be better public move and should be better in a long run.

Should I go and trouble my team estimating this roadmap?
 
I think you are right. We don't want to suffer the same fate as betamax because we didn't want to be associated with naughty stuff. But the reality is, it can't be the job of the core developers to create this type of tool.

Personally I think it is simply the job of the core developers to create digital cash. In my eyes, the fact that Bitcoin lacks privacy features is a defect, not one that I expected Satoshi to solve from day one, but something any cryptocurrency must have. Fungibility makes up part of the value of any currency, loss of privacy causes loss of fungibility, and therefore loss of privacy causes loss of value.

I don't see that because a currency has more privacy features than another, that this quality in way implies that the developers should spend time on services that rely on higher privacy. Rather, services that require privacy should use whatever currency suits their needs, and if it turns out that privacy features are highly valued, the developers can choose to spend their time on that. To do it in reverse puts the capitalist cart before the consumer horse: "because we have made this, we must also make this", rather than "people liked what we made, so we will make more of it".

I'm against a Dash-only fork of OB for two reasons:

First, forks are expensive to maintain. Literally every single change implemented in OB-Bitcoin would have to be merged and tested in OB-Dash. OB-Dash would not find it practical to add Dash-specific features, because if they were not merged into OB-Bitcoin, they would compound the cost of maintaining the fork, as it diverged further and further away. I've seen all this happen in a commercial setting – the company in question was only saved from this eternal nightmare of maintaining an almost (but not quite) equivalent fork when the client of the fork went bankrupt.

Second, it fragments the network. Instead of having people shopping using Bitcoin, and then seeing the occasional listing accepting Dash, and being able to transition incrementally to Dash by making first the odd purchase, then increasingly more over time, they would see nothing of Dash until something compelled them to switch to the alternative network. Instead of having a system where your tape recorder plays both VHS and Betamax, and you choose which tape you want each time, it would create the same constraint as physical hardware, where you have to switch player each time you switch tape format. Software can do much better than this, we don't need to impose the constraints of the past.
 
Just to make this even more fun, I just discovered in the OB Slack that there is a Go server in the works, which I am led to believe is intended to replace the Python version.

When I just wrote about forks being expensive to maintain, I never envisaged redoing everything in another programming language as one of the overheads o_O
 
Oh bummer... Don't loose heart @ashmoran - you never know if some GO nut joins your efforts! Are you sure they're rewritting the code and it's not an addon feature or something? Seems weird after so much dev time they'd throw the towel in on python. It's not like it's a dummy language.

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Ok, we can go other way around: create dash-only OB fork and then add multicurrency capabilities there. I'm not sure it's better from startup point of view, but I agree with you - it will be better public move and should be better in a long run.

Should I go and trouble my team estimating this roadmap?

yes please ! :rolleyes:

Oh bummer... Don't loose heart @ashmoran - you never know if some GO nut joins your efforts! Are you sure they're rewritting the code and it's not an addon feature or something? Seems weird after so much dev time they'd throw the towel in on python. It's not like it's a dummy language.

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i think they figured by now as well that they made this way to hard to start and maintain
 
Ok, we can go other way around: create dash-only OB fork and then add multicurrency capabilities there. I'm not sure it's better from startup point of view, but I agree with you - it will be better public move and should be better in a long run.

Should I go and trouble my team estimating this roadmap?

I would say YES, trouble them! And I DO agree about creating a dash-only fork - this is exactly what I had in mind. As for multicurrency capabilities being added later...I don't have any objections, but also don't really see the benefit to the Dash community. At this point WE might all know and understand the enormous advantages of Dash over other cryptos, but many others don't. Like someone else said, the soda machine was great publicity...perfectly illustrating instant transactions. DashBazaar would also be great publicity....and unlike the soda machine, this "publicity" will be much more sustained, as more and more people actually begin USING DashBazaar.

Build it and they WILL come!
 
I'm against a Dash-only fork of OB for two reasons:

First, forks are expensive to maintain. Literally every single change implemented in OB-Bitcoin would have to be merged and tested in OB-Dash. OB-Dash would not find it practical to add Dash-specific features, because if they were not merged into OB-Bitcoin, they would compound the cost of maintaining the fork, as it diverged further and further away. I've seen all this happen in a commercial setting – the company in question was only saved from this eternal nightmare of maintaining an almost (but not quite) equivalent fork when the client of the fork went bankrupt.

Second, it fragments the network. Instead of having people shopping using Bitcoin, and then seeing the occasional listing accepting Dash, and being able to transition incrementally to Dash by making first the odd purchase, then increasingly more over time, they would see nothing of Dash until something compelled them to switch to the alternative network. Instead of having a system where your tape recorder plays both VHS and Betamax, and you choose which tape you want each time, it would create the same constraint as physical hardware, where you have to switch player each time you switch tape format. Software can do much better than this, we don't need to impose the constraints of the past.

I don't think it is necessary to merge and test every change in OB-Bitcoin with DashBazaar. Note, "DashBazaar" not "OB-Dash". This would be its own, unique product, with features and changes that will slowly diverge from the current OB over time. So it would not be a "parallel" fork, so to speak, but a truly "divergent" fork. Of course, if there is something that is "done right" in OB, or some beneficial feature, then there is no reason we should not implement or duplicate that. I could be wrong about this, and it might be beneficial to maintain a "parallel" fork. This is not really my main point here, however.

My main point is in regard to the "fragmenting of the network." I actually think that creating a unique Dash-only version will promote the use of Dash much more quickly than a multi-currency solution. By simply ignoring and moving beyond the already outdated and inferior technology of bitcoin, and into the much superior technology of Dash, we will be making a very bold statement...and this statement WILL be heard by the crypto-community. As the price of Bitcoin falls, and the price of Dash rises, we will see more and more people selling off their BTC and buying DASH...accelerating this process of conversion from BTC to DASH.

As someone on here has said, "We are the Dash Nation." I don't see many other real nations accepting multiple currencies...but I do hope to see OUR currency gain widespread global acceptance.
 
This would be its own, unique product, with features and changes that will slowly diverge from the current OB over time.

The downside would be the necessity to continuously support the product, which would drag resources, either by consuming time of those developers who'd like to code for fun, or by consuming dash network funding to pay developers.
 
The downside would be the necessity to continuously support the product, which would drag resources, either by consuming time of those developers who'd like to code for fun, or by consuming dash network funding to pay developers.

ja i totally hear you, you are totally right
as much as i wish we should do this right now
in the end, we are still too early and should wait until they are more 'stable' (in code and everything)
and than do it proper !
otherwise this might really turn into a huge pain, as a lot of updating/ or starting new at some point might be nessacery
i think (unfortunately) we should give this another 3-6 month and then reevaluate
:(
 
My main point is in regard to the "fragmenting of the network." I actually think that creating a unique Dash-only version will promote the use of Dash much more quickly than a multi-currency solution. By simply ignoring and moving beyond the already outdated and inferior technology of bitcoin, and into the much superior technology of Dash, we will be making a very bold statement...and this statement WILL be heard by the crypto-community. As the price of Bitcoin falls, and the price of Dash rises, we will see more and more people selling off their BTC and buying DASH...accelerating this process of conversion from BTC to DASH.

Hmmm, you may prove to be right, but this is big a gamble. Bitcoin may limp along and be usable and popular enough for a while that OB functions well enough with only Bitcoin. In that time, DashBazaar would need continual maintenance to keep it up to date with OpenBazaar.

There is a tendency among cryptocurrency businesses towards diversifications, many businesses that started Bitcoin-only are adding more currencies. This gives their customers easy ways to be experiment with cryptocurrencies during this uncertain period. *I* believe that Dash is the most suitable Bitcoin replacement. I've spent quite a long time analysing Dash and understanding its design advantages compared to Bitcoin, as will have many/most people here (certainly in this thread!). But most people in the general cryptocurrency community have not, and they only have a watch-and-see strategy.

If Dash is truly the most appropriate cryptocurrency for digital cash and is sufficiently superior to Bitcoin to replace it, it will do so as people freely adopt it for trade. I am uncomfortable with the line of thinking "Dash is superior, so DashBazaar should be Dash-only", not because it is wrong, but because it might look presumptuous to others.

What happens if a group of developers adds ether payments to OB, and so OB has Bitcoin and Ethereum integration, but to spend Dash you must use DashBazaar? However superior Dash may be, it would be on an island on its own.
 
ja i totally hear you, you are totally right
as much as i wish we should do this right now
in the end, we are still too early and should wait until they are more 'stable' (in code and everything)
and than do it proper !
otherwise this might really turn into a huge pain, as a lot of updating/ or starting new at some point might be nessacery
i think (unfortunately) we should give this another 3-6 month and then reevaluate
:(

Since I have got this idea stuck in my head and I can't get it out, I'm going to do a code spike and see how far I can get adding Dash payments in parallel to Bitcoin payments in OB. I am thinking:
  • Everywhere there is a Bitcoin amount/address there should be a Dash amount/address
  • There will be no interaction between Bitcoin and Dash, to buy something priced in Dash you must have Dash and find a merchant who accepts Dash
  • There will be no abstraction of cryptocurrencies, it will simple duplicate the existing structures and run them side by side
This will produce some awful code (duplication everywhere, with no abstractions that would facilitate a third currency), and awful user interface (I will just hack Dash fields into any available space) and an awful user experience (anything other than Bitcoin-Bitcoin and Dash-Dash will fail in an unspecified manner). But it will hopefully map out what would need changing to integrate Dash, and reveal how feasible it would be to read production quality, and indicate how expensive it would be to maintain.

I don't expect this will produce anything usable, but it's a little research experiment I can spare some time on now. (Note that, yet again, I will literally be all over the place over the next month or two, so any progress will likely be in small random chunks.)
 
So OB developers don't want to cooperate with dash?

For me the best option is to have OB with support for dash - you will be able to buy stuff with bitcoin, you will be able to buy stuff with dash if the seller has dash adress or with dash and toward bitcoin adress (e.g. shapeshift) .
All you need is the field for dash adress and the way that OB trustlessly checks Dash blockchain, which is likely the problematic part.
 
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