What does having worked for Booz Allen have to do with anything?

"The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

– Paul Kedrosky

I heard this quote through http://www.paulgraham.com/kedrosky.html, and it stuck with me. It seems apt.

What does working for Booz Allen have to do with anything? Well, it was important enough that someone created a throwaway just to post it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830703

That got me curious. I was ready to dismiss it (throwaway account + conspiracy-ish implications), but I dug around and found an article that corroborated it:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/03/16/openb...

Then there’s the ethos of OpenBazaar’s chief purveyors: Brian Hoffman, a former lead associate for cybersecurity at Edward Snowden’s old employer Booz Allen Hamilton , long-time Bitcoin specialist Sam Patterson and academic Dr. Washington Sanchez. After taking over the OpenBazaar project after a few emails from its original creator Amir Taaki, one of the first to promote and develop Bitcoin and the associated Dark Wallet, the trio sought to make a platform free of government control where companies could make more money by cutting out the middleman, typically the owner of the store like eBay or Amazon, who take a small percentage of each sale on their respective platforms. With Bitcoin, the middlemen, the banks and credit card companies who took a cut of traditional transactions, were already removed. But the platforms (yes, including those dark web drug and gun markets) still took their slice. With OpenBazaar, there’s only the buyer and the seller.

Now, I've left the full quote for journalistic integrity. I believe that the reader should be informed, and that reporting shouldn't be biased one way or the other. Let the reader make up their own minds.

You'll notice he was a lead associate for cybersecurity. From having worked in the security industry, that seems pretty close to saying "This is someone who worked directly in the field, doing the type of activities that the NSA does." That may be false, but the point is, we don't know. We don't know anything about his background beyond that. At the very least, people here were curious:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830923

I'm not sure what to make of that, but it seemed worth mentioning.

Absolutely worth mentioning - because it implies similar roots as Tor: a project that provides a platform for plausible denials communication for the intelligence community in the case of Tor - for a "dénivelé" marketplace in the case of Open Bazaar.
Things like iran-contras would probably be easier today (under many Panopticon watchers) with such tech available.

It sure is worth mentioning! But then, Snowden has similar roots. So ???
But yes, I'm sure that the code will be reviewed carefully.

At this point, I was ready to dismiss it as a coincidence. Someone who worked for Booz may not have directly enabled a lot of the abuses that we saw there, based on Snowden's evidence. But then I started thinking about why the investors were investing in this project. There's no user model, no clear growth, and you've stated that you'll never take any fees. Is the fact that you landed investment and the fact that your founders have ties to the NSA really so unrelated?

It's coincidence, and I'll be the first to admit that it seems stupid and conspiratorial to go down this rabbithole. That's why I didn't. But you're pushing me to justify myself here. There are so many people on reddit who are asking "When is tor support coming? How can we use OpenBazaar to sell illegal goods?" And your project has responded with quiet support. Sam even tested OpenBazaar on Tails for them. Do you think those users wouldn't find the founders' ties strange? Or maybe care?

You've successfully galvanized me here to not simply ignore all of this. If you're as low-level as you say, you shouldn't be coming on HN and representing OB in such a manner. You're talking about strategy, extending invitations for people to join you, and have the ear of the founders. You're a dev, like me.

Which is why it was doubly interesting that you chose to respond by thumbing your nose and declaring smugly that you are unstoppable, and even being like "What are you going to do about it?" We devs are uniquely qualified to do something about perceived abuses. I don't know if that will happen here -- we'll see -- but why am I doing this? Because of the #1 rule: The reader should be informed, and you guys have been extraordinarily shifty about some basic questions.

This leads to the drug issue. You're marketing this as a decentralized eBay with a wink and a nod, while shipping Tor support with your v2. You claim you'll immediately remove any illegal activity from your search engine, but we all know that your search engine will be irrelevant.

There are many ways to introduce this technology to the world in a positive, substantive way, that will help people instead of hurt them. How about popping up some self-help resources for users that you notice seem to be fitting the pattern of an addict? You're making the code. You have the capability to do that, even if it's decentralized. Their identity may be anonymous, but you can see what they're doing and you can try to help them. You can have discussion forums in the app itself where people can talk about this and helpfully help people who are hurting.

Have you ever helped someone who was addicted before? I've tried, and I've seen how tremendously destructive darknet markets have been in their lives. It was the sole reason they were able to continue their addiction. You are planning on just sweeping this under the rug while profiting off of people like them. That's what we call a "dick move" where I'm from, to say nothing of how morally reprehensible it is to facilitate this technology while turning a profit.

My goal here is to think of a way to introduce this technology without turning any profit. I'm thinking of doing an ICO for my own personal dev resources, since I need money to float myself to work on this. It will be the lowest-capped ICO in history, and the token will have no utility whatsoever other than to gauge interest in whether people feel it's a good idea to try to wrestle control away from a VC-backed startup. But if the technology is inevitable, then it's worth trying.

Now, this whole time, it's been completely obvious that you really have nothing to worry about. The odds are overwhelmingly likely that I will fail to do anything more than make a little ripple. But you have come on here and specifically aimed some petty bickering at me in response to raising some serious concerns about your project. And they're not just my concerns -- people were talking about them quite level-headedly before you showed up. We like to think about how technology will impact the world on HN.

Based on all of this, I think the OpenBazaar project has demonstrated some ineptitude while callously dismissing the idea that any of this is wrong or that it shouldn't be done. If you would just own it, and admit that this is what you're doing, then it would be different. You could say "Well, we know this has some serious implications, and we're trying to do this partly so that it comes into the world in a positive way." But no, you want to engage in some petty squabble. Look at what's at stake! And this is what you spend your time on?

The die is cast. We'll see how things turn out. And I wish you luck in your own venture.