[njarboe]

OpenBazaar looks like a great project, but with $4.25 million in backing from VCs, it does not look like a charity project. How do you plan on monetizing your work? It was not clear to me from the OpenBazaar or OB1 websites. I only ask because many great products work well when VC money is supporting it, but then are seriously degraded when the company needs to start showing revenue and then a profit.

[usrusr]

In an ideal world, maybe from selling consulting to commercial sellers? In reality, I see absolutely no overlap between the kind of business who would ever consider paying for FOSS consulting and the kind of business who would trade on a more chaotic version of eBay.

But could an IPFS distributed system provide reasonable search, e.g. competing with eBay's new search-by-image?An open, distributed market can be worked by closed, centralized search engines. If they design the market they are a prime candidate for becoming the dominant search engine layered on top.

[SamPatt]

I responded to this elsewhere:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15561370