While it is easy to imagine ways in the future in which efficiencies can be improved upon in the physical world economy with innovations like driverless trucks and drones for delivery, 3D printing and robotics for manufacturing, but in the digital economy we are rapidly closing in on a level of peak efficiency in the digital goods marketplace.

Today with OpenBazaar and bitcoin it is possible to sell a song, video, ebook, picture, podcast, audiobook or any other digital media with essentially immediate and free delivery and the only expense is the bitcoin miner’s fee for validating the transaction. With OpenBazaar it is possible to add a moderator in case of a dispute to protect both buyer and seller, and if the transaction goes well there is no expense for this protection. The only way to reduce costs in this system would be to reduce the mining fee (which there looks to be many solutions in the near future) or by using a different cyrptocurrency with a different consensus algorithm that can somehow scale to bitcoin’s size with a lower transaction fee while still providing the same level of decentralization and security to the system.

While OpenBazaar has a competitive advantage with zero fees in comparison to traditional peer-to-peer online marketplaces like Ebay and Etsy in physical good commerce, in the digital realm it can start to nibble away at Apple’s, Google’s and Amazon’s dominance in the sale of digital media by providing applications that make it easy to access their OB purchases in a streamlined platform like iTunes or Google Play on all their devices. Even in a high bitcoin fee environment of ~25 cents per transaction it is already competitive with iTunes for a single $1 song download after Apple takes it 25% or more cut. Now consider a larger purchase like an entire album, movie, ebook or audiobook with a cost of $15 and a 25 cent transaction fee looks incredibly small compared to the few dollars Apple will extract from the same transaction. Even the small scale sale of 1000 albums each sold at $15 with a high mining fee would be ~$3,500 more efficient for the economy than using iTunes. It will be hard for any artist, author, musician or filmmaker to pass up such savings if OpenBazaar can match the user experience and network effect that the big players in the space have built.

It is amazing to think that for a large segment of the economy (entertainment) we are nearing ultimate efficiency and that will be impossible to reduce costs further now and into the future since the invention of peer-to-peer decentralized marketplaces and digital money but that is the only conclusion I can see. What an exciting time to be alive. Come join in the fun! Free the market, free the World!!

If you have more insight, critiques or interested in more discussion on the topic please join us at: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBazaar/comments/5u1fpx/reaching_peak_efficiency_in_the_digital_goods/