A new app allowing users to sell anything to anyone in complete privacy has been launched, opening a new front in the fast-developing war between coders and the law.

Bitmarkets, an opensource app available for download at voluntary.net, is the latest in a series of technical innovations by digital activists who want to prevent surveillance over commerce and communications.

Bitmarkets allows users to post advertisements for products for sale or request items and services they want to buy, and broadcasts these to all connected users. Deals are struck between individuals, with the site taking no commission.

Payments are processed privately between traders and customers using bitcoin, meaning no simple money trail can be followed in the event of any criminality. Funds are held in a type of escrow and use built-in bitcoin signature technology to release funds when both parties are satisfied upon succesful completion of a deal.

With no central entity controlling the market, there are no limits on what can be sold. The site has just a handful of listings and a similar number of users.

The developers of the app say their aims are explicitly political. “We don’t like the possibility of a world where every transaction you make over your entire lifetime will be tracked,” Steve Dekorte, the lead developer on the project told Bitcoin news site, Coindesk. “We feel this is a basic human rights issue.”

A graphic designer on the app, Chris Robinson, in an essay posted to Reddit, rejected claims the software would encourage criminality.

“What about drugs, guns, pornography etc?”. This is the first thing out of most peoples mouths whenever you bring up the possibility of having a market that no one entity owns or controls. Yes, some people will probably use these types of markets for bad things, but 99.9999% of people will not.”

Robinson said that the software will instead enable free trade without institutional interference. “It is the first time in history where anyone anywhere can trade with anyone else without asking permission,” he wrote.

“Think of all the billions of people worldwide who are currently locked out of financial services who would be able to use these [markets], improving their own lives and their local communities.”

Built on BitTorrent and Tor

A spokesman for the Cyber Crime division of the National Crime Unit told the Guardian that users of the software who broke the law should expect capture.

“We are alive to the fast pace of technological change, and the fact that cybercriminals will seek to exploit new and emerging technology for their own ends. We and our partners have the ability to investigate, identify and locate those who believe they can anonymously engage in serious and organised criminality online.”

Bitmarkets differs from current online illegal marketplaces because is no central server where the site is hosted that investigators could physically locate and attack. The marketplace is decentralised – meaning each user connected to the app is part of the market’s technical architecture.

The app is built on the framework of an anonymous messaging service, Bitmessage, which takes its inspiration from BitTorrent software. In the BitTorrent protocol, files – generally pirated, copyright works such as films and music – are downloaded in a swarm by users who connect and broadcast to each other, “seeding” or uploading the file in small chunks until each downloader has a complete copy.

With Bitmarkets, that decentralisation means the market is hosted by potentially milions of users in hundreds of countries. Communications between parties can be encrypted, and all internet traffic the app generates is encrypted, as it uses anonymising Tor software by default.

The Bitmarkets app is similar in functionality to OpenBazaar, another decentralised market app. That software launched in August but did not offer native Tor encryption as standard until October.

The launch of the Bitmarkets software, available for now only on Mac OSX, follows November’s Operation Onymous, a co-ordinated worldwide darkweb takedown that shuttered dozens of sites selling illegal drugs and other services hosted on sites that hid their whereabouts by using Tor.

The chief target of that campaign was the latest iteration of the Silk Road, the notorious drug-dealing site that replaced the original site that was captured on an Icelandic server by the FBI in October 2013. The trial of the alleged owner-operator of that site, 29-year-old Texan, Ross Ulbricht, is in January 2015 in New York City.

His alleged successor, Blake Benthall, 26, was arrested in San Francisco in November and is also awaiting trial.

• US to sell bitcoins worth $19.8m seized from alleged Silk Road owner

