BitHappy and OpenBazaar are positioned to lead the bitcoin goods trading software race, as both platforms prepare for a December launch. Cointelegraph reached out the dev teams to understand more about each software. Brian Hoffman, lead developer of OpenBazaar, gave us his point of view on both projects.
Two Apps With Similar Objectives
If you want to sell goods online or in your physical shop for bitcoins, you still need to set up a website, a shopping cart or a POS that supports Bitcoin. In this, a store accepting Bitcoin is not much different from one that accepts traditional credit card. Both BitHappy and OpenBazaar look to deploy immediate options to create functional, complete, “Bitcoin only” stores.
The BitHappy Solution
By integrating with the Mycelium Wallet, users get a full featured solution to set up a store. Stores come complete with photos, descriptions, prices and payments in bitcoin. It’s a matter of minutes, really, just take a picture of your product, add a description, price, category, a video maybe, and sell the item for bitcoins.
On top of the store management, the app will also allow the user to search items and services sold for bitcoins both locally and globally.
OpenBazaar Aims Higher
At the moment, the most straightforward competitor to this app is probably OpenBazaar, a very interesting open source project that is already downloadable at beta stage on GitHub.
And although the official release date is still unknown, Brian Hoffman assured us that the project is 87% completed and it should be released by the end of this year.
Discussing the differences between the two projects, Hoffman said:
“The UI [of BitHappy] is very unpolished and tells me that they haven't put a ton of thought into user experience but it could be more of a proof of concept. The geolocation services are interesting.We actually plan to try and incorporate listings by geography as well at some point and have built it into the protocol. [BitHappy] only looks mobile right now and we don't support mobile yet, we are just desktop for now. There's no API for developers either it seems. OpenBazaar is more of a platform and app rather than a business and associated app. I can't tell where they are storing listings to be searched. They must be using a centralized database on their side which would be a huge differentiator between them and OpenBazaar. I think any work going towards advancing ecommerce for Bitcoin users though is great and we'd love to see more of this type of project!”
Brian also added that the OpenBazaar project is probably designed to be bigger and more refined than the BitHappy, stating: “The team is backed by OB1 which is a funded company plus all of the GitHub contributors.”
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to try out both of these applications.