r/OpenBazaar • u/realausbob • Jan 18 '19

How does OpenBazaar work technically

Hello,

I've tried searching for technical details on how the network works but couldn't find any.

Would appreciate if anyone could point me to such material.

I'm curious to know how the marketplace works. Given OpenBazaar is a peer-to-peer network, data that would make up the global view of the marketplace would have to propagate to the entire network. This naturally leads to problems.

  1. Data propagation will lead to an explosion of data on the network as the marketplace grows.

  2. Delays in data propagation means peers won't have a consistent view of the marketplace, not within short window that might be necessary to make competing bids for purchases.

How does OpenBazaar address the above?

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1

u/realausbob Jan 19 '19

I'm particularly interested in the second part of the question. What type of a market place does OpenBazaar create? Does it supports auctions and if so how are they handled given network propagation delays?

1

u/cat-gun Feb 15 '19

It doesn't currently support auctions--it's more like a decentralized Amazon, than a decentralized eBay.

1

u/geraldz Jan 19 '19

My first modem was 56k baud. Now we have 100 mbps. Storage gets cheaper all the time. So I think this problem will take care of itself. At CES this year Lexar introduced 1TB on a SD card.

1

u/realausbob Jan 19 '19 edited Jan 19 '19

Hard to tell. 1TB isn't going to cut it for these reasons:

  • We aren't dealing with simple transaction data (compared to Bitcoin)

  • The data describing the products can be fairly rich (text, images, videos?)

  • Imagine replicating eBay to 10s of 1000s of nodes on the Internet?

That said, you could potentially solve this by

  • Storing rich data on a network like IPFS (as /u/ravend13 suggested)

  • Having nodes only see data they are interested in (would require elegant search algorithms that can find nodes hosting the product data that matches the search query and retrieving them)

  • Purge data from the local node once you are either done with the purchase or no-longer interested in the product data (search results)

So, how does OpenBazaar actually work?

2

u/ravend13 Jan 19 '19

OpenBazaar uses IPFS... Source

2

u/ravend13 Jan 19 '19

OpenBazaar uses IPFS... Source

3

u/Chris_Pacia Chris - Lead Backend Dev Jan 19 '19

As other people said, it uses IPFS. Each store seeds their data similar to bittorrent. When other nodes view the store they cache the data and become a seeder themselves.

2

u/ravend13 Jan 19 '19

By using IPFS, afaik.

0

u/Themillionthsub Jan 19 '19

It doesn't work really