It's a safe bet that FBI director James Comey and Brian Hoffman would not get along.

Earlier this week, as Comey was testifying to a US House Committee about the risks of encryption letting criminals "go dark," Hoffman and his team were working on a "testnet" release of OpenBazaar — a decentralised and uncensorable online marketplace that can be used by anyone to sell anything without fear of police intervention.

OpenBazaar has been in the works in some form since 2014, when it was conceived by controversial bitcoin developer Amir Taaki.

The vision is an online peer-to-peer market, in the vein of eBay or Etsy — but unlike eBay, transactions will take place using bitcoin, and the entire site will be decentralised across the network of people accessing it, making it impossible to close down.

Hoffman subsequently took over from Taaki, rebranding the project as OpenBazaar, and in June 2015 it took a $1 million (£700,000) seed round from tech venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

Since then it has been working toward a public release of its software — and on March 2, the project took a big leap forward.

The testnet is live — and a full release is just weeks away...