OpenBazaar released the 1.0 series in April earlier this year. We've seen a lot of activity on the network despite many technical shortcomings that we knew we had to address in the following months. Personally I've made dozens of sales and purchased dozens of items, as have many others, which has been an awesome experience for our community.
We're working on the 2.0 series right now which will feature the following:
- Upgrade of the P2P and networking backend to IPFS. The reason for this is to have a more robust foundation and enable distributed hosting of store data. Currently, your node has to be online in order for other peers to access your content, and these peers themselves don't host the content if you're offline. All of that will change with 2.0.
- Upgrade of the client. More features to bring the ecommerce UI/UX of OpenBazaar to a level that users expect in centralized platforms, including critical things like inventory management.
- A Bitcoin wallet. This will be a SPV Bitcoin wallet to make sending and receiving purchases super easy.
There are loads more that I'm not covering so I'll refer you to our official post on the upgrade: https://medium.com/@therealopenbazaar/openbazaar-2-0-p2p-trade-takes-the-next-step-4d75b7f23ec8#.se773ooso
Would it be easy to integrate other forms of payment like Steem Dollars or other crypto to OB?
No it wouldn't be easy because a lot of the contract and payment wiring is geared for Bitcoin. It's a pretty huge effort on our part to do this, and we have to be very strategic with our time. But this is an open source project, so we're happy to accept any great PRs that are submitted.
In the meantime, we recommend you use a service like ShapeShift.io and other exchanges to convert in and out of Bitcoin to the cryptocurrency of your choice. Also we plan to support plugins to make that process easier.
Great thx for the update and good to hear the progress! Yeah a bridge like Shapeshift and plugins would probably suffice.
Welcome @drwasho
wow ... na na na ...
Currently, your node has to be online in order for other peers to access your content, and these peers themselves don't host the content if you're offline. All of that will change with 2.0.
... damn amazing ....