When the recording industry smashed Napster with a $20 billion lawsuit more than a decade ago, filesharing morphed into Bittorrent, a fully peer-to-peer system with no central server for law enforcement to attack. Now the developers behind one software project are trying to pull off a similar trick with the anarchic model of bitcoin e-commerce pioneered by the billion-dollar Silk Road black market. And just as with Bittorrent, their new system may be so decentralized that not even its creators can control exactly how it will be used.

This weekend, the developers behind OpenBazaar plan to release a beta version of the software designed to let anyone privately and directly buy and sell goods online with no intermediary. They describe it as “pseudonymous, uncensored trade.” Rather than hosting its commerce on any server, OpenBazaar installs on users’ PCs, and allows them to list products in a file stored in a so-called "distributed hash table," a database spread across many users' machines. Everything will be paid in bitcoin. The result of that peer-to-peer architecture, they hope, will be a marketplace that no one—–no government, no company, not even the OpenBazaar programmers—can regulate or shut down.

“We’re just really passionate about allowing peer-to-peer trade to happen online. We want that to exist,” says Sam Patterson, the operations lead for the non-profit project. “The internet allowed you to communicate directly. Bitcoin allowed you to send money directly. Now you can trade directly.”

And just what will you trade on OpenBazaar? A good first guess might be drugs. The multi-headed marketplace, after all, is designed to thwart law enforcement seizures or takedowns that arrest any one person or group. And though it doesn’t currently offer much anonymity by default, Patterson says its initial version can be used through a VPN to hide users’ IP addresses, and it will soon integrate the anonymity software Tor or I2P.

In fact, OpenBazaar was first launched in April as a spinoff of another open-source prototype called DarkMarket. That project's anarchist creator, Amir Taaki, says he was inspired by the FBI's takedown of the Silk Road and designed DarkMarket to “equip the people with the tools needed for the next generation of digital black markets.”

But Patterson and OpenBazaar founder Brian Hoffman adamantly insist OpenBazaar isn’t designed for selling narcotics, guns, or other contraband. They see their invention as a freer, more democratic eBay or Craigslist, with no seller fees and no one to arbitrarily change the rules or censor products. “We’re not the ‘Super Silk Road.’ We’re trying to replace eBay in a better form,” says Patterson. “We recognize that people may choose to use that technology in a way we see as distasteful, immoral, and illegal, but we’re giving them the option to engage in a kind of human interaction that doesn’t exist right now.”

Patterson says OpenBazaar is "listing agnostic," and argues the vast majority of buyers and sellers will use it for the same type of things sold on eBay and the now-defunct Bitcoin marketplace Bitmit. But in one post on OpenBazaar's developer forum, he recommends suggesting that developers talking about OpenBazaar with the public cite example products that are "illicit but socially acceptable."

"Raw milk? Radar detectors? Fireworks?," he writes. "Stuff that people wouldn't disagree with but is technically illegal to sell because of stupid laws."

But Taaki argues OpenBazaar's creators are kidding themselves if they believe their marketplace won't become a haven for more serious contraband. "I think it’s intellectually dishonest to try and convince yourself that black market activity isn't a big part of it," he says. "People want to buy the things you can't buy on eBay like guns, drugs, or pornography."

Silk Road-inspired markets like Silk Road 2.0, Agora, Evolution and more than a dozen others offer a cornucopia of contraband in exchange for bitcoin. But they all suffer from the same problem of centralization that killed Silk Road when its alleged creator, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested last year. Administrators of black markets like Sheep Marketplace and Atlantis have absconded with users' bitcoins stored on their servers. The Silk Road 2.0 and more recently the smaller site Cannabis Road have both been hit by hackers who stole six- and seven-figure sums of users' bitcoins.

With its distributed model, OpenBazaar would be far more resilient. Instead of storing bitcoins in a hackable or seizable central repository, they would be held in so-called "multi-signature" accounts designed to prevent fraud. When an OpenBazaar user attempts to buy something, the buyer and seller choose a "notary" who serves as an independent third party in case of disputes. And two out of three of those parties—the buyer, the seller and the notary—would have to sign off on a transaction before it could be completed or the money refunded to the buyer. Notaries will be incentivized with small fees on every purchase they oversee.

To keep everyone honest, buyers, sellers, and notaries all will have reputation scores stored in "web of trust" model that allows users to keep their own assessments of sellers and notaries and query each other to find out how their friends have rated those users. New users can bootstrap their reputation by "burning" a certain amount of bitcoin—permanently destroying it in a way that anyone can check on the public ledger of bitcoin transactions called the blockchain. That sort of sacrifice is designed to make serial scamming unprofitable, since ditching a reputation and creating a new one would become much more costly.

Despite those clever safeguards, users should approach OpenBazaar's untested code with caution. Patterson suggests that in its beta, no one should spend more than small amounts of bitcoin on the market, or better yet, they should use the "testnet" set up to simulate bitcoin transactions instead of real money. But the project has a two dozen contributing developers, and hopes to iterate quickly to patch its flaws. "We don’t expect people to be running store fronts any time soon," he says. "This is really just to get a sense of what needs to be fixed."

If OpenBazaar does prove reliable and users aren't turned off by its complexity, it could someday become a marketplace that flouts all forms of regulation, just as its filesharing equivalent Bittorrent has become a nearly unstoppable tool for copyright-infringing pirates. Patterson suggests that OpenBazaar's creators may create a voluntary whitelist option that allow users to prevent themselves from seeing illegal products. But that filter could be turned off by any user interested in exploring OpenBazaar's darker side.

In fact, OpenBazaar's peer-to-peer design means its creators won't be able to stop anyone from selling anything they'd like. Hoffman admits that if users obscure their listings from the software's search function, the developers may not even know what's being sold. "What happens if the market turns on us and becomes flooded with [black market] material?" he asks. "Unless we go on their computers, we can't do anything about it. The network is the network. We may never even know what it's being used for."

Hoffman even adds that he might leave the project if his marketplace becomes overrun with contraband. "I'd be willing to walk away from it. I have no problem with that," he says.

If OpenBazaar works as advertised, however, it may not matter. "At that point it may already be too late," he concedes. "The technology will be out there."