OpenBazaar Needs Freenet

Congratulations to the OpenBazaar team for their hard work and on their recent release! I firmly believe that global, decentralized, anonymous marketplaces will liberate millions. Whether it loosens the grip of a despotic state, or breaks the monopoly of a private company, OpenBazaar will help many, many people. For this reason I consider OpenBazaar’s work incredibly important, and therefore important to implement correctly. Unfortunately, the first production OpenBazaar release is conspicuously missing anonymity. Lack of anonymity severely hampers OpenBazaar’s ability to do good. Due to lack of information, I was under the mistaken impression that OpenBazaar stopped prioritizing anonymity. Recently, however, I was happy to read their recent blog post. The post enumerates five key limitations of OpenBazaar’s initial release. They address my two key concerns and three other important concerns I had not considered. Most importantly for me, they acknowledge the importance of anonymity for OpenBazaar. While I was overall encouraged, I was a bit disappointed to see IPFS favored over a project I’ve recently become passionate about: Freenet. Freenet has been battle-tested for 15 years and directly addresses three of the five limitations of OpenBazaar, and indirectly supports a robust solution for a fourth. On the other hand, IPFS is young and only addresses one of the five issues. Though IPFS is experimenting with integrating third party anonymization solutions, that only addresses two of five. Even if/when these changes are completed, I believe Freenet is a superior solution even for the two. These two are anonymity and offline storage, something Freenet is designed to do from the ground up. Freenet allows users to anonymously publish and receive pieces of static data, which fits well with OpenBazaar’s model.

Offline Stores

The OpenBazaar post correctly recognizes that many users may not want to run OpenBazaar’s server at all times. Currently, if a user turns off their OpenBazaar server their store becomes inaccessible. This problem is doubly important because I want OpenBazaar to help people worldwide, which must include people without reliable internet access. Freenet directly solves this by not storing data on the computer which publishes it. Using Freenet’s basic data insertion, OpenBazaar users could anonymously publish contracts which could be accessed even after the user went offline. When data is inserted into Freenet, it is stored on other computers according to a derived routing key. When that data is accessed, it becomes replicated across additional computers in accordance with its popularity. For this reason, data on Freenet cannot be DDoSed by repeatedly querying it. Contrast this with OpenBazaar’s current model, where identifying the correct computer to DDoS is facilitated by the network, and the data is not replicated elsewhere. IPFS does satisfactorily solve this issue, but it is still a relatively young project.
On the other hand, Freenet simultaneously solves multiple problems today, with over a decade of testing.

Anonymity

As I alluded to in the previous section, on Freenet, computers and IP addresses have nothing to do with the content they store, anonymity is built in. Freenet further improves anonymity by dividing and encrypting all data, limiting knowledge that other nodes may have about the data you are inserting or requesting. There exist (statistical) caveats to this, Freenet’s default behavior obfuscates data insertion and access quite effectively. More importantly, Freenet provides a mechanism for gaining stronger anonymity by only connecting to trusted friend nodes. By doing this, you further increase the difficulty of analyzing your traffic. The larger your network of trusted friends is, the better you are protected. In this way, privacy can scale with one’s desire for increased privacy. Freenet is also exploring a tunneling concept to provide yet another layer of protection. All said, Freenet provides adequate anonymity by default, and provides the ability to improve anonymity as needed by adding trusted friends. IPFS on the other hand does not support anonymity natively, and any support will be experimental for the foreseeable future. Further, Freenet is designed to simultaneously support anonymity and offline caching, and the two properties compliment each other. This is opposed to the way IPFS would interact with privacy layered on top. Consider that Torrenting via Tor is discouraged due to traffic requirements. Instead, popularity of a piece of data on Freenet makes its retrieval more efficient as it is replicated in more places.

Reputation

Freenet includes a third feature OpenBazaar requires in the form of an official plugin developed directly by the Freenet Project Inc. WebOfTrust is a plugin for Freenet that provides spam-resistant data publishing on the Freenet network. It accomplishes this by defining the concepts of identities, and trust between identities. An identity (optionally) lists other identities which it trusts or distrusts, and by how much. By considering all known identities, this produces a directed, weighted graph with identities as vertices, and trust relationships as edges. By traversing this graph from one identity to another, WebOfTrust calculates how much that identity trusts another. OpenBazaar can utilize this framework by setting trust based on their seller reviews. If Alice is scammed by Eve, and Alice writes a negative review, Alice’s WebOfTrust identity would indicate distrust to Eve’s identity. If Bob has positive or neutral trust to Alice, Bob would then transitively distrust Eve. Each trust relationship also may have arbitrary data attached to it, allowing a proof to be included. Furthermore, if Bob determines that Alice’s bad review of Eve is fraudulent (lacking a proof), Bob may choose to lower his trust of Alice in response. Those who trust Bob would then have lower trust of Alice, and potentially higher trust of Eve.

Search

Finally, Search can also be facilitated by the above Reputation algorithm. If a user is well trusted, and they claim a contract belongs to a particular keyword, that will be considered “correct”. If a user is not well trusted, the keyword may be ignored when searching. Conflicting keywords would be resolved by some weighted summing and a threshold value, and spamming keywords could be discouraged by automatically distrusting identities which do this (such spam would be identified manually by the user). In fact, prevention of spam like this is the core purpose of Freenet’s WebOfTrust!

Because Freenet adeptly addresses three of five significant concerns of OpenBazaar, I argue that the OpenBazaar team ought to carefully evaluate Freenet as a potential backend platform for OpenBazaar. I have a decent working knowledge of Freenet and am more than happy to lend my efforts to the OpenBazaar project (though there are far more knowledgable individuals in the Freenet project). I did not seriously pursue this earlier because I was under the impression OpenBazaar was de-prioritizing anonymity, but I am happy to find that I was very mistaken. This document will undergo further revisions, but I am going to publish it as soon as possible.

I intend to follow this post with a more concrete proposal for a Freenet backend. I also welcome any questions, comments, or corrections for this article.

P.S. Thank you to the redditors that brought the OpenBazaar blog post to my attention, and encouraged me to publish my thoughts. (And thank you to the OpenBazaar team for making the world a better place)

The original OpenBazaar blog post: Current Limitations of the OpenBazaar Software

What Is Freenet?

Freenet is our answer to oppressive governments and corporate control. Though it’s actually 15 years old, Freenet’s time has arrived, in a big way. Freenet is a computer network designed from the ground up to protect your privacy and your freedom of expression. Many people early on viewed Freenet as a tool to liberate people in oppressive regimes like China. For these people, Freenet could re-open the free flow of information by avoiding China’s restriction. Recently however, Freenet shows additional utility in sidestepping corporate censorship even in relatively free countries. We also know that American intelligence agencies are actively involved in violating individuals’ right to privacy throughout the world. These two forces threaten your privacy and freedom of expression worldwide. Freenet is our tool to resist.

To protect your privacy and ensure your freedom of expression, Freenet’s network provides a distributed data store to computers on the network. Through Freenet, you can publish a website, videos, photos, songs, documents and statistics or any other data. There are also social media applications that exist only on Freenet, so you can say what you want, and truly be yourself. When you publish on Freenet, you can choose to keep your identity secret, and you can’t be censored. Freenet protects your privacy by anonymizing your requests for data on the Freenet network, and prevents censorship by storing data redundantly on different computers around the network.

Since Freenet is functionally a massive data storage system, Freenet supports two basic operations: “insert” and “fetch” data. When you insert a file into Freenet, Freenet encrypts it, chops it up into smaller pieces, and stores these pieces throughout the network. If you insert data into Freenet, and share a link with your friends, they are able to access that content even if your computer is off. In this way, publishing content is as simple as sharing a link! Since there are no servers to attack, and you are anonymous except if you choose not to be, you can express yourself freely! When you fetch a file from Freenet, your Freenet client software asks other computers on the network for the pieces it needs. The encrypted chunks of files cannot be decrypted by people who don’t have the link, so computers storing those chunks don’t really know what data they’re storing. This also means that when your computer asks another computer for a piece of data, the other computer doesn’t know exactly what data you’re retrieving unless they also have the link to it. The fact that your computer could end up temporarily storing content an encrypted copy of data you find offensive may make some people understandably uncomfortable.

Though all of us wish to express ourselves freely, we may find other people’s expression to be unacceptable. The price of our own free expression is accepting others’ free expression. Freenet does not allow you to censor other people’s expression with the benefit that they cannot censor yours. From a technical standpoint, either it is possible to censor everything, or it is not possible to censor anything. We aren’t able to pick and choose, without also allowing others to censor us. While the rest of the world errs on the side of limiting free expression, Freenet makes the opposite decision, to err on the side of free expression. In future articles I will address these moral and practical concerns, and detail why I accept this, and why I think you should too.

Freenet unites anti-censorship properties, strong privacy, and decentralization, to foster human liberation. For 15 years the Freenet project has developed and deployed software to support these goals. Now more so than 15 years ago, the world desperately needs forces for anti-censorship, strong privacy, and decentralization. I encourage you to join Freenet today, participate in its communities, and say “No!” to censorship. If you’re able, I also ask you to contribute to the project. Freenet is driven by volunteer effort and community contributions. You may imagine that I mean you should write code or donate money. I do suggest you do these things if you are able. Freenet Project Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization so monetary donations are tax-deductable, but there exist many, many other opportunities to help. Simply by filing bug reports, writing documentation, helping others troubleshoot the software, inviting friends, or even just by participating in the network you fight to liberate yourself, and people around the world. If we wait to embrace Freenet until after we need it to escape an Orwellian dystopia, it will be far too late. It’s imperative that we make free communication ubiquitous long before we need it.