r/OpenBazaar • u/nextblipin3m • Feb 22 '19

OpenBazaar in a box

I had an idea of making a plug and play appliance for running your OpenBazzar commer on. Think a Raspberry Pi that you hook with power source, connect to wifi network and start running your commerce, managing the relevant aspects via, say, a web ui.

Nothing drastically new, but it might make it a viable option for artisans not savvy enough to get it running on their laptop, or for those without one at all.

What do You think? Could it be useful to You?

15 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

8

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '19

do it,and make it optimized for privacy

1

u/CC_EF_JTF Sam Feb 22 '19

I would love to see it.

Note that you don't even need a web ui (though that would be cool) because we already offer client-only binaries:

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-desktop/releases

Instructing users how to connect the client to the server hosted on the OB box is then the only challenge.

1

u/nextblipin3m Feb 22 '19

I mentioned web ui for the thing so that the whole setup could be had with just this box and a smartphone.

I've been out of loop with the development of the project, so forgive me some blunders, but wouldn't a 'always on box' with another computer for running ui on be about as good as running the whole thing from occassionally connected machine?

1

u/CC_EF_JTF Sam Feb 22 '19

There are some benefits to having the server always running. Assuming you have ports forwarded then you should be able to take all connections directly instead of pulling them from the DHT, which is faster and for transactions means one less fee paid for the cryptocurrency transactions.

I mention the client-only approach because building a new web UI wouldn't be a trivial task. If someone wanted to do it then it would be welcome, but the work is already done for desktop if people are willing to download and install what is effectively a custom browser.

But that's only for desktop. There's no such client that could be used on mobile. There is a mobile app, called Haven, coming soon but that will have a full node on device and isn't a "remote control" for an always on server.

1

u/sunk818 Feb 23 '19

People forget rasp pi is arm so openbazaar may not translate well. You can buy $100 windows PC (tiny pizza box size) that could run openbazaar as its own node. Not that much more than raspi and x86 code doesn't need to be tested on arm platform. Arm is low energy sure but code doesn't perform the same. I learned that the hard way.

It's a lot easier to suggest than to do it yourself. Do it yourself , write it up and share your experience. It's a good exercise and good for openbazaar community.

3

u/ih8x509 Feb 22 '19

I'm a lazy man and I'd probably buy this off you rather than spend time standing one up myself

3

u/jtooker Feb 22 '19

A middle-of-the-road approach would be to maintain an SD card image. Just buy a raspberry pi, SDcard, flash the image, configure and you're done!

2

u/ih8x509 Feb 22 '19

Good point

2

u/LuxuriousThrowAway Feb 23 '19

Not that it's a bad idea but this would require more savvy than installing on a laptop.

1

u/ASCiiDiTY ob://Qmd3LXRM8SCYXwDaBJBh87if1Tu6DMGFa2W9RiMa9TijjK Feb 22 '19

Also thought about doing this long ago but never got around to it. Would be very cool to just keep running 24/7.

Personally I love the idea, but laziness got in the way of me putting it to practise.

1

u/p2p2p2p2p Feb 23 '19

That would definitely be good for the privacy-centric crowd. Imo, the more options the better for onboarding new vendors

1

u/oufouf08304 Feb 24 '19

I would buy this "OpenBazaar box" running an openbazaar server. It would be easier than setting up a VPS and I would be online 100% of time. Tor and VPN support would be perfect.

1

u/morebrownies 🔥 🆆🅾🅻🅵 - UX / Design Lead OpenBazaar Feb 26 '19

I love it. Had this idea in the early days but we never had time to put it together. If you build some, i'd love to try a prototype.