
Nile: decentralized, commission-free, local-economy focused Amazon alternative - marcocastignoli
https://github.com/open-source-ideas/open-source-ideas/issues/78
======
hardwaresofton
OpenBazaar[0] already _is_ this idea.

I just checked the github post and one of the committers to openbazaar-go has
left a nice lengthy comment explaining why/how[1].

Hopefully the people interested in Nile just put their support behind
OpenBazaar instead.

[0]: [https://openbazaar.org/](https://openbazaar.org/)

[1] [https://github.com/open-source-ideas/open-source-
ideas/issue...](https://github.com/open-source-ideas/open-source-
ideas/issues/78#issuecomment-410764389)

~~~
SamPatt
I work on OpenBazaar and want to add that we've built it to support people
creating custom front end clients for their own particular use case and are
not compelled at all to use the reference client.

So they can use the OpenBazaar backend but still have the local focus they
want by making a new front end.

We've been working on decentralized ecommerce for a long time and I would love
for a fresh group of developers to take a look at it and give us their
thoughts. It's all MIT licensed open source.

~~~
jaxtellerSoA
How does a distributed market (like OpenBazaar) deal with trust? Is every
transaction put into escrow?

The idea of a open, distributed market, is great. But the reality of scammers,
cheaters, etc. is a big hurdle to over come. One of the great things about
Amazon is the customer service, I don't really worry about not getting a
product, or if I need to return an item to Amazon I am also confident that it
won't be an issue. This seems really hard to accomplish in a distributed
system with lots of small "shops".

~~~
SamPatt
There are two types of payments in OpenBazaar: direct and moderated.

Direct is when buyers completely trust vendors. There's no escrow and no
safety net at all.

Moderated is when both parties agree to a third party moderator and the funds
go into a two of three multisig account. Two parties need to agree to release
the funds. Normally it's the buyer and seller but if they can't agree then
they open a dispute with the moderator, who resolves the dispute and sends the
funds to rhe winning party (or slipts them).

Moderators get a small percentage payout when disputes are settled. It's an
open marketplace for offering moderator services.

The moderator doesn't have complete control of the funds (two parties are
needed) and they aren't even aware of the transaction until a dispute was
opened, so it has some advantages over traditional centralized escrow
services.

~~~
antidesitter
What’s the current status of proof-of-burn for reputation?

~~~
SamPatt
Not used. I was in the very early versions of OpenBazaar.

------
bovermyer
The software piece of this is not the hard part. The social piece is.

Admirable goal, but good luck getting wide enough adoption to achieve
viability.

~~~
wild_preference
This explains just about everything. Can’t remember all the times I’ve read
some pompous HN comment “pah, I could build it” and then thought, “well, you’d
be just 0.01% of the way there.”

Nothing kills this delusion more than spending a year building something that
you can’t seem to successfully market... multiple times. Then you realize
there’s almost zero value in the technical part, and you can only chuckle at
HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if that’s the crux of a new
business.

~~~
weberc2
> you can only chuckle at HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if
> that’s the crux of a new business

I definitely relate to this. I use Go a fair amount, and any conversation
about Go on /r/programming invites a whole bunch of "every product built on a
language without generics is doomed to fail". While generics would be a nice
feature to my mind, I like Go for the tooling and the ecosystem, which are
still an insignificant contribution to the success of a commercial product,
but still many times more significant than the type system (and I'm a fan of
type systems too).

~~~
chosenbreed
Interesting...the simplicity of the language appeals to me. If the tooling and
ecosysstem is as great as you say it is I'm in ;-)

------
dodyg
Nice name :) Greetings from Cairo.

My team is working on an hyperlocal e-commerce system that connects small
stores with people in their neighborhoods. Delivery is limited to walking or
bike distance performed by the vendors themselves.

Cairo is full of small vendors in every street. Most of people living in high
rises. You can get everything delivered already.

At the first stage we will just save vendors from taking orders via the phone
by hand by allowing them to receive orders on their phone. The next step is to
create credit system that eliminate the wastes of vendors or customers when
they don't have exact change.

~~~
ohiovr
Hi! I posted a desire for something like this on the thread already! I just
want to say I'm interested. I think it would be cool if people could share
their stuff or sell their stuff to maybe a select group of people like family
or extended family. The deal is it needs fulltext search and the ability to
have privacy. This sort of thing would be great for situations like "I want to
make ice cream. Should I buy an icecream maker for $99? Lets look at what my
family has.. Oh great, Beth still has hers I'll message her to see if I can
borrow it"

~~~
dodyg
Yeah. Right now I think people rely on WhatsApp groups for things like these.

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goda90
Would this gave the option for one organization in a city to do the work for
small stores? I can imagine stores might not have the resources to host a part
of this, but maybe the municipality, a co-op, or a large company that wants to
support the local economy could host it. This comes to mind because my
employer wouldn't have a need for this since we make enterprise software, but
we profess to support the local economy via hosting a farmer's market, using
local food when possible in our cafeteria, encouraging local bookstores for
reimbursable education materials, and even sponsoring the local public radio.
We would have way more resources to host an instance than a corner shop that
sells yarn.

~~~
wukerplank
There are businesses built on top of local economies, e.g. Atalanda in
Germany: [https://atalanda.com/](https://atalanda.com/) (I'm not affiliated,
but I know people who work there.)

They partner up with local businesses for the goods and bike courier services
for the delivery.

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nudpiedo
I am not sure whether the name "Nile" was picked because of the "Amazon" river
or because Nile is a symbol of being the only major river flowing from south
to north.

The former would be mundane, the later a great metaphor.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Found your claim astonishing, so googled it.

Looks like this is not true, at least the Ob river (3,650 km) and the Yenisei
river (3,438 km) are major rivers flowing from South to North (Both top 10
rivers).

So not sure where you did get that piece about the Nile from.

~~~
macintux
When I was in grade school, my _science_ teacher told the class rivers
couldn't flow north because, on a globe, north is up.

Somehow pointing out the Nile wasn't conclusive evidence against it.

Public education in America!

~~~
komali2
Ooooh is this a subthread for ranting about public education in a America?
Cause I come from a family of teachers and I have WORDS!

In a little school district in Texas, we can't use the word "adaptation" in
our cellular biology section.

Recent history textbooks use strange language around black slaves that seems
to imply they were "workers," rather than, you know, _slaves._

Eh. I'll stop. I gave up on teaching ages ago, but my mom still gets drummed
up in front of the principal at least monthly for some bullshit. Most recently
because the students have a shared box of basic supplies at their little desk
pods (scissors and markers), and some mom demanded her son be allowed to use
his own supplies because she didn't want him using the "Communist supplies."
Verbatim quote. She thought it would teach him the values of communism.
Obviously my mom told her to fuck off in no uncertain terms, so stern meeting
with the principal for July...

~~~
WorldMaker
I still remember that in Elementary school in Kentucky the teachers
"accidentally" showed an Elementary-focused science series that included a
video on plate tectonics and they had to apologize to the class and parents
for showing such an "advanced and controversial topic". That left a lasting
impression to this curious kid about how such simple science topics could even
be so controversial, when the teachers looked pained at every follow up
question I had days later. (As someone with a terrible anti-authoritarian
streak at that age, this show of weakness in the teachers didn't help.)

~~~
komali2
In middle school in South Carolina, a public, accredited, full-time teacher
saw me reading Harry Potter, walked up, and said "You know that book was
written by Satan, right?"

Written by Satan. Not, like, "that book has satanic values" or "was written by
a satanist" or "has evil themes," it was literally written by satan.

It's no wonder I was such a shithead little anarcho-atheist growing up.

------
krmmalik
Hi. What you're describing is a public market much like those that were in
Andalus and also in use by the Greeks and for the reasons mentioned on the
GitHub page this is what led to the prosperity of those societies. I have a
unique set of skills when it comes to Strategy, process and narrative. Soft
skills basically. I would love to get involved or at least have a chat with
the founders of how I may be able to help. If the founders are reading this,
please tell me how I can get on touch.

------
kbumsik
Does this need to be decentralized? Decentralized does not necessary mean
fair. How a decentralized platform could sove the problems OP mentioned;
paying taxes (by using a decentralized platform, really??) and profitable for
economics?

It is too naive to think decentralization simply can solve any social
problems.

~~~
8bitsrule
'Democracy' does not necessary mean fair either. (Even in places where it
isn't just a label.)

Decentralization solves problems created by centralization. It replaces them
with the problems created by decentralization. We're fairly certain now that
centralization creates social problems. Decentralization eliminates big
dictators in favor of petty dictators.

------
foxhop
Hey there, I have the same vision. I drafted a blog post on Friday (just
published it) discussing the first phase that I plan set in motion.

I would like to partner up with you on this.

Reference: [https://russell.ballestrini.net/all-local-heros-need-a-
gig-s...](https://russell.ballestrini.net/all-local-heros-need-a-gig-side-
kick/)

------
TheCapeGreek
I don't particularly agree with the delivery suggestion. Basically a volunteer
UberEATS style delivery with bicycles? To say this is ambitious is an
understatement. Bicycles are not nearly as used as you'd think, and
decentralized delivery with volunteers will probably raise the cost of
delivery (effort/petrol/time) as well as no one would actually trust this. So,
suggesting a local delivery service would be more ideal, but that again is a
pretty lofty goal with the amount of local options. So I suspect this will end
up querying a few well known delivery services if they are available in the
customer's country, and give a rough estimate of that cost.

Next, expecting the stores to bear the brunt of the store power also brings
into question the technical knowledge of the store management. You'd need
dedicated personnel for this since most people wouldn't know any of this. And
granted, people who have the relevant knowledge to host and maintain the
instance wouldn't be working in a store most likely anyway.

All that being said I don't want to complain too much. I like the idea but as
it has been submitted there are a lot of practical holes in it considering the
"market" it would best serve (areas not already touched by long ecommerce
giant fingers) not having the necessary knowledge and infrastructure.
Personally I'd suggest taking a look at how other popular decentralized
systems work and seeing how ecommerce would fit into that (mainly, Mastodon).

------
s73v3r_
The biggest issue with Amazon currently is counterfeit products. How is this
planning on addressing that?

------
kire2345
What is the incentive for the shops to scan and upload all products with
correct description picture etc. this is a huge work, and just the access to a
bigger market doesn't seem to be enough. Locafox in Berlin is pretty much
trying to build a similar aggregator of local shops
[https://www.locafox.de/](https://www.locafox.de/) It doesn't seem to work too
well which is why they diversified into selling digital cashier machines to
local businesses instead.

------
mittermayr
I feel like people don't know the difference between "doesn't pay taxes" and
"pays no tax" —– one is illegal, the other one is typically a success metric
of accounting.

(Disclaimer: I'm not advocating things like the double Irish w/dutch sandwich,
or similar methods — while more or less legal — I personally agree of course
how morally questionable tax-tricks can be to society, this is just to make
sure we're clear that technically, most companies are a for profit and profit-
maximizing operation)

------
ohiovr
I would be interested in a kind of federated marketplace, similar in structure
to Nextcloud's federation. I would be responsible for my users, but other site
owners can link to mine and we can expand our search for the goods we are
interested in. We can just transact in cash just like a garage sale. It might
be cool to have a private version of this so a family or extended family could
share their stuff to save money and get more facetime.

------
debatem1
Amazon is successful because it brings nearly everything a consumer wants
within two days' easy reach. They are able to do so because they have an
excellent logistical ground game, maybe a peerless one. Without challenging
them on this you are not truly competing with Amazon.

This is more like competing with instacart or similar. That's a reasonable
market, but operationally is a very hard nut to crack. I don't think having
volunteers on bikes is going to manage it.

------
chosenbreed
Mmm...interesting idea...a bit Utopian...I'm not sure the world works that
way...good luck to anyone investing their time, effort or other resources to
get this going.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Much of what we take for granted in the modern world looked utopian before it
was available.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Not sure in which way e.g. the telephone or lightbulb looked utopian at the
time. Most inventions had similar predecessors.

Perhaps you're thinking of social inventions like the social security nets in
western Europe - I'm not as good in their history.

------
syntaxing
I see a lot of people mentioning OpenBazaar here. I remember trying it out a
year or two back when they had an early release. Has the OpenBazaar community
grown? I haven't found anything I was interested in buying through it. I feel
like the weakest link with stuff like Nile or OpenBazaar is that there is no
good search engine out there for consumers to discover new products easily.

~~~
SamPatt
I work on OpenBazaar. It has grown significantly over the past couple years.

I'm mobile and don't have the stats in front of me but I do know that the
network has been used by more than 55k people since last November when the 2.0
version launched.

It's now built on IPFS so nodes are still accessible even when the store is
offline.

OpenBazaar.com launched as a read-only way to browse the network.

A mobile version is nearing completion now.

Check out OpenBazaar.org and download the new version, we're proud of how far
it has come.

------
simple10
Digital Town is working on a similar idea with a notable team and funding.
Each city/town gets it's own domain or can use an existing one. It's a bit of
a resurrection of 90's style search portals for the blockchain era.

[https://digitaltown.com/](https://digitaltown.com/)

------
X6S1x6Okd1st
Openbazzar?

~~~
k1ns
When I went to Google that, the first autocomplete was "openbazaar drugs".

~~~
ofrzeta
That must be based on your search history :) I get completions in the
following order: search, token, tor, github, 2.0, shops, blockhain

------
usermac
Amazon pays no taxes? Got this from the introduction.

~~~
jamroom
Looks like they paid no US income taxes in 2017:

[https://www.seattlepi.com/business/tech/article/Amazon-
paid-...](https://www.seattlepi.com/business/tech/article/Amazon-paid-no-US-
income-taxes-for-2017-12713961.php)

~~~
chosenbreed
I couldn't access that the article...are they saying that people who work for
Amazon paid no income tax?

~~~
metamicah
No, it's corporate income tax, a direct tax imposed by the federal government
on corporations. The rate can be 15% to 35% but there are so many deductions
available that large companies like Amazon are often able to dodge it
completely. For instance, the article mentions a $917 million deduction on
stock options exercised by employees, which was probably the bulk of the
deductions.

------
tanilama
The description feels like a recipe for disaster.

------
nickdandakis
I love how oblivious (blissfully ignorant?) the "How will you earn money?"
section is.

 _> The application is decentralized so we just need money for the developers,
the lawyers and the advertisers, we don’t have to build and maintain a huge
and expansive network infrastructure. So we’ll just earn money from
advertisement, but it will not be specific for you, because we want your data
to be yours, and we will accept to advertise only local products._

 _Just_ need money for developers, lawyers, and advertisers huh? _Just_ earn
money from advertisement!

A utopian marketplace that runs on ad revenue makes little sense to me. I
would've liked to see the "decentralized system" part replaced with a boring
"centralized system", and the boring "advertising revenue" replaced with
something else.

~~~
ozim
IMO everything that is wrong about internet now is because people don't have
better idea for monetizing than slapping ads on a page. Big players like goog
and other ad networks made it even worse making it easy to enter, just slap
adwords on your page and earn. The more users you have the more you earn,
which breeds clickbait.

Someone will have to run centralized node for city, so _we don’t have to build
and maintain a huge and expansive network infrastructure_ goes out of the
window also, bitcoin miners are not running nodes for free and not for
advertising money from their servers. How would they make sure that ad revenue
for running server is higher than cost of running server?

It is also oblivious to fact that amazon has full fleet for delivery,
warehouses. Where they propose everything _commision-free_ but then magically
_the money for the delivery goes directly to the cyclists involved_. _An
algorithm calculates the best and cheapest route to deliver your goods._ , I
also expect that running bike delivery service is much more complicated that
calculating best and cheapest routes.

So I went full rage mode on this one, it is ignorant, visionary, buzzword
ridden, writeup. But maybe I should judge it as just fiction writing not
actual business idea.

~~~
nickdandakis
I think you should judge it as what it is. A tiny write up of an idea where
each answer needs a lot of work to be implemented fully.

I don't know if advertising is the culprit for the bad aspects of the
internet, but I agree that creators/companies don't put any effort into
alternative revenue streams. Not only that, but consumers have been trained to
expect free content at the expense of ads. Yes, consumers are becoming more
and more aware of the privacy-for-service trade they've implicitly agreed to.
But I think it'll take years (if not decades) to reverse the "free
content/service" mentality but also to have any other revenue stream rival
"slapping on ads and calling it a day".

Subscriptions aren't the solution either, with more and more people experience
subscription fatigue.

Maybe there isn't some Ultimate Monetization Method™ for internet services and
content, but at the very least I'd like to see less defaulting to advertising.

~~~
ozim
Ultimate maybe not but I believe there should be just fair method for each
type of content or service or business. Unfortunately users are not fair as
well (sharing, multi accounts, freeloading) so yes it is in some part users
fault as well.

------
arisAlexis
thse projects are nice but there needs to be incentives

------
Arzh
This is / can be filled by craigslist or facebook marketplace.

~~~
waffle_ss
No, this is for combining a local area's retail stores' inventory into a
unified shopping interface, and a courier service for seamless delivery (e.g.
so you don't have to visit stores x, y, z to complete pickup of a single order
with items from disparate stores). Not individuals hawking their used junk.

~~~
Arzh
Stores are already doing that on craigslist and facebook, this would just be
hooking up a delivery service to it and you have it. Still seems like a pretty
weak idea.

~~~
waffle_ss
I'd love to know how stores are synchronizing their entire shelf+backstock
inventory to Craiglist or FB Marketplace given neither service even has an API
(Craiglist allows bulk posting but that's useless if you can't bulk
delete/update for availability) or even basic metadata like product quantity,
UPC/EAN, etc.

Ignoring that, the services you're talking about don't even do any kind of
canonicalization or grouping of products like Amazon, so if you search for
"Xbox" you're going to have to click through many pages of individual listings
rather than having a unified product page displaying product details and specs
from the manufacturer, consumer reviews, related product variants (e.g.
color), etc.

It's fine if you think the idea's weak but at least give the idea a fair shake
before dismissing it.

------
benlorenzetti
An ironic name.

------
gwbas1c
"Amazon alternative"

To what? AWS? S3?

~~~
dolessdrugs
to the river

------
asimpletune
Where are you based?

