About Latest Posts Latest posts by Dean (see all) My Long Awaited Altcoin Trading Article: STOP BUYING ALTCOINS THEY ARE IN A MASSIVE BUBBLE Orocrypt ICO: Own a share of a gold backed cryptocurrency network Wagerr Decentralized Sportsbook: ICO Crowdsale; ‘Be The House’ Oracle Opportunities When eBay first launched in 1995 it heralded a revolution in shopping, allowing anybody who could access the internet to buy and sell with other individuals.Suddenly the costs of setting yourself up as a retailer crashed through the floor, whilst consumer choice skyrocketed.It was this peer-to-peer character of eBay which allowed it to flourish through the famous dot com bubble and out the other side.But under the surface the likes of eBay are just digital versions of traditional business model, for example the auction house.Today, economies of scale have allowed sites like eBay and Amazon to utterly dominate online retail.Yet the peer-to-peer empowerment of the individual which has made them so popular does not extend below the surface.

Underneath it all, these sites are little different from the giant retail conglomerate of old.Sellers are often forced to pay high fees which make earning a profit difficult, whilst risking giving away control of their brand – making it difficult for them to break free from the platform in the future.Meanwhile shoppers often do not realize that the products choices on offer are controlled and limited behind the scenes from corporate HQ.Now a new breed of services is coming to the fore, which enable a truly peer-to-peer shopping experience: decentralized marketplaces.These new decentralized marketplaces generally use digital currency for payments, and often operate using the same underlying technology which powers Bitcoin and other digital currencies.They offer a wide range of advantages to both sellers and shoppers: In this article decentralized marketplaces are considered as alternatives to eBay and Amazon, so their advantages are given in comparison to these services.The entire experience for both buyers and sellers is considered.

In this section an introduction to the most popular services is provided, along with a comparison of features and a consideration of their relative advantages compared to each other and as alternatives to eBay and Amazon.Probably the most well-known and popular service available today, OpenBazaar is built on top of the BitMessage protocol and uses Bitcoin for payments.After receiving $1 million in seed funding from an angel investor, the service is undergoing rapid development and improvement.The code which runs OpenBazaar is open source and available for anybody to check and review.There are no fees charged by OpenBazaar, meaning that it is usually free to buy and sell anything using OpenBazaar.In order to ensure the safety of both buyers and sellers a moderator system is used.You select your own moderators and they only charge a fee if there is a dispute they need to resolve.At the moment there are even some moderators offering their services for free.Learn more and get started from the OpenBazaar website or take a look at our new article on OpenBazaar for sellers.

Syscoin is an ‘altcoin’ or alternative digital currency, which has its own decentralized marketplace built directly into the coin’s blockchain.bitcoin price crash 2013Like OpenBazaar, this service includes escrow services and a reputation system to protect both buyers and sellers.bitcoin for dummies good wife watch onlineBecause all offers are listed on a public blockchain, Syscoin can offer a number of features which are not available using OpenBazaar.bitcoin bear chartOne of the most interesting of these is the reseller option which is currently under development, and which is aimed at the extensive global dropshipping market.one litecoin in usd

This will allow sellers to choose whether or not to allow other people to resell their products, to set a commission to pay these resellers, and even set whitelists of approved resellers.bitcoin atm worldwideEven before that however, anybody can set up their own front-end website and choose which of the products listed on the public blockchain that they would like to display to their customers.bitcoin exchange swedenIn the future this will also help the Syscoin market to overcome one of its greatest obstacles – the fact that all products must be bough and sold for Syscoin itself, a currency which is not as widely used as something like Bitcoin.set up own bitcoin mining poolFront-end website owners will be able to set up sites that take payment through other methods, whether that is Bitcoin or Paypal or credit cards, include their own-mark up to pay their costs and earn a profit, and then pay for the products via the blockchain using their own pool of Syscoin.rival networks bitcoin

They will also be able to filter out certain types of products, meaning that there can be an open marketplace where anything goes on the blockchain itself, but at the same time there can also be cleaner shopping websites which do not display illegal items.cours du bitcoinOther features include price-pegging, so that sellers can list items for ‘$5 worth of Syscoin’, for example, rather than having to price their products in a volatile cryptocurrency, anonymous payments, and the ability to set listings which expire in a fixed period of time after which they are ‘pruned’ or deleted from the blockchain.Learn more from the Syscoin website.BitHalo and BlackHalo are essentially the same piece of software – you even download and install the two together, but the first one uses Bitcoin whereas the second uses Blackcoin.The system is based around ‘double deposit smart contracts’, which actually have a wide range of uses beyond online shopping: from hiring freelancers to currency exchange.

Using these double deposit smart contracts both the buyer and seller put money into a contract program, which only pays out if they both agree that it should by signing a transaction.They are time limited, and if an agreement is not reached within the time limit the coins are lost.This ensures that neither party has anything to gain by trying to cheat the other one.If the seller doesn’t deliver, for example, they don’t get the payment and they also lose their own deposit.The system also features its own encrypted email system, the ability to send and receive digital currency to an email address rather than a cumbersome public key which can be difficult to share, joint accounts with multi-signature functionality, barter and direct trade options, and more.It can take a bit longer to go through the initial learning curve to get started with BlackHalo compared to some of the alternatives, but its worth doing.You can find more information about this on the BlackHalo website The NXT marketplace is built onto the blockchain of the popular NXT altcoin.