This will not work, because regular bank wire transfers and cash deposits have been reversed in the past, the sender simply claimed hacked account or fraud.
I found their proposed mechanism for handling settlement finality, outlined in their faq, https://bitsquare.io/faq/. The escrow for bitcoin is a 2 of 3 multi-party contract.
What happens if the person buying bitcoin does a
chargeback on their national currency after the bitcoin
has been released from the multisig escrow?
We only support payment methods in which chargebacks
are not easy (i.e. we don’t support Paypal). But there
is still certain chargeback risk with banks. If a bank
executes a chargeback after the cryptocurrency escrow
has released, there is nothing the arbitrator can do.
Bisq’s goal is to make this scenario as unattractive
as possible, using three primary mechanisms:
1. There is a trade limit of one bitcoin, which is
generally too small to attract criminals (though this
limit may be lifted in the future).
2. We will remove national currency payment methods
which are found to be used for chargebacks.
3. Bisq has support for delayed payouts using the
“locktime” feature, which might help if the chargeback
is done quickly after the transfer.
There is a trade limit of one bitcoin, which is generally too small to attract criminals (though this limit may be lifted in the future).
I feel like technologists consistently overestimate where the lower bound is for size of an opportunity which causes it to attract adversarial attention, given an adversary who understands e.g. specialization of labor or, more prosaically, how for loops work.
Indeed. One bitcoin was over $3k about 5 weeks ago, and is still over $2k today. Scam someone for half a bitcoin twice a week and that's over $100k a year at current value.
Pretty sure I could devOps account/wallet creation initial wire transfers in a few days. Hilariously, the only gate would probably be those damn centrally own banks that get quezzy about transferring 2k on a 3 day old account.
Exactly. The assumption is that would-be fraudsters would neatly obey other rules/norms, such as opening one account tied to one legitimate funding source.
Anyone who has run an online business that moves money can tell you that fraudsters are ever-probing for that weak spot and, if it is there, they will find it.
There is too much "generally" and "might" in their risk mitigation here, such that their primary line of defense really boils down to hope. Meanwhile, they've managed to create limitations that may well infringe on legitimate activity.
They really need to re-think this problem or they'll have their hats handed to them in short order.
I believe the safety is in that you can't frequently issue chargebacks. Once, twice, but eventually the bank starts investigating. It's not a scalable scam.
But often they are using a stolen account, which is the whole reason why the bank is willing to issue the chargeback. If you can steal a lot of accounts, you don't care.
Some facts:
We had about 4500 trades with 2500 BTC in one year and there have been only one charge back case with 300 USD (via ClearXchange). If we get more issues with charge backs on ClearXchange we will remove that payment method.
With SEPA in Europe the victim of the charge back need to agree to it (in most cases at least, there are a few reports that banks did the charge back without asking). So traders should simply not accept the charge back. Payment methods which are easy to charge back like PayPal are not supported in Bisq.
most organized crime that scale have people inside the banks. trivial to find some small Swiss Bank that will make a deal with a criminal to allow thousand of chargebacks in one day. and that's the danger, not your average cc dump buyer.
still not a bad alternative to localbitcoins.com, you could arrange to exchange cash in person or mail money orders around which could still be cancelled if the escrow fails.
The fundamental problem is that practically all exchanges are credit-based, and decentralized credit doesn't make sense.
When you want to purchase bitcoins on an exchange, you start out by depositing e.g. dollars on the exchange, thus converting your dollars to that exchange's dollar token (IOU x USD). You then sell your dollar tokens for bitcoin tokens on the exchange, which is super fast because it centrally controls token ownership, and when you want to get your bitcoins out you sell/redeem your BTC tokens for actual BTC.
This system, which is how all large exchanges work, is inherently centralized, because it uses a central debitor (owes USD/BTC to customers) to handle token ownership, which works really well because it puts no limit on performance (as opposed to a system where we use a blockchain to define ownership).
One partial solution is to separate the debitor (funds holder) from the actual exchange: instead of exchanges issuing their own tokens (bitstampBTC, bitfinexUSD, mtggoxBTC, etc.), there would be dedicated issuers (lots of them), and an exchange would constitute a central meeting place, which accepts a specific set of issuers, and to whom people can sign over their tokens in order to engage in a trade. So, for example, a buy order would constitute signing over a token worth the buy order's value to the exchange, which immediately matches it with a sell order, swaps the owner of the matched tokens (after deducting a small fee), and sends the tokens to the buyer and seller.
> When you want to purchase bitcoins on an exchange, you start out by depositing e.g. dollars on the exchange, thus converting your dollars to that exchange's dollar token (IOU x USD). You then sell your dollar tokens for bitcoin tokens on the exchange, which is super fast because it centrally controls token ownership, and when you want to get your bitcoins out you sell/redeem your BTC tokens for actual BTC.
Wouldn't that be a perfect problem for a smart contract? It could be used to generate such tethering tokens, hold all real coins (ethereum, here, but if I got it correctly, lightning will implement smart contracts in btc blockchain as well in the future), allow for fast token exchanges and then slower withdrawal from the contract stash. Converting fiat to tokens is still the problem, here, obviously.
Yes, I also think exchanging tokens is one of the (few?) situations where a smart contract really is a great solution to a real world problem (as opposed to blockchain hype).
Definitely an interesting area, I've been watching this space, here's some interesting ones:
On the tethered tokens side, https://decentralizedcapital.com seem to be offering tethered tokens backed by real currencies (and cryptocurrencies on other chains). Not heard much about them though.
Implementing full exchange matching rules is pushing at the limit of what's possible in an Ethereum smart contract - https://ubitok.io are working on it (disclaimer: I'm involved with them!).
As others have mentioned, https://etherdelta.github.io is one of the better known decentralised token exchanges - though they do use an off-chain matching engine so it's not totally on-chain.
https://oasisdex.com have gone the other way - they're 100% on-chain, but they don't try to do best execution / automated matching - you have to pick an order to trade with.
OK, suppose you want to sell Litecoins for USD cash in a bank account.
Now, admittedly, it might be that today a one stop centralised exchange is the best choice for you.
But by introducing intermediate Ethereum based tokens, you've broken down the task into three parts, potentally allowing more competition for each part:
1. finding someone willing to exchange your Litecoins for an Ethereum tethered-LTC token
2. finding someone willing to exchange your Ethereum tethered-LTC token for an Ethereum tethered-USD token
3. finding someone willing to exchange Ethereum tethered-USD tokens for bank account USD.
Part 1 is purely crypto-currency-based (albeit on different chains), and so should have lower fees than anything involving fiat transactions. It's also free of exchange rate risk, so doesn't need a fully-fledged exchange - should be easy to automated and audit.
Part 2 is purely Ethereum-based, and this is where competition should drive fees down to near-zero. Because a smart-contract can run this, there's (potentially!) zero risk of the exchange being hacked / running off with your coins / taking weeks to verify you / being shut down by regulators.
Part 3 still involves the ugly movement from crypto to banking. But now it's just going from tethered-USD to USD - so for the processor there's no exchange rate risk, or need to deal with weird and wonderful cryptocurrency networks.
And perhaps one day you'll be able to live without Part 3 - you might start to find you can spend tethered-USD in more and more places without needing to go to a bank account ...
Disclaimer: I'm involved with the https://ubitok.io decentralised Ethereum exchange so I do have a bit of a vested interest in decentralised exchanges! Would love to hear some counter opinions though ...
Thank you for taking the time to answer. Respectfully, I see no point in the mechanism you outline above.
You're moving the icky cash-for-tokens risk source from the established coin markets to your private coin with no added benefit I can discern.
If you already assume I as user don't trust the established exchange, what makes you confident that this setup with the added complexity alters any downside/risk/cost of transferring value from coin tokens to cash?
[Edit] For instance given a user with a diversified portfolio of coins, in what way does adding another coin like asset facilitate any of the coin-coin or coin-cash transactions?
I agree you probably won't see much benefit if most of your transactions involve cash-in-a-bank-account or coins on non-Ethereum chains.
However, if:
- Ethereum continues to grow; and
- we continue to see more and more successful/useful coins/tokens built on top of Ethereum (especially if asset-backed ones are accepted as payment);
Then we're going to see a lot more coin-coin transactions that /can/ be done on-chain - at which point a smart contract exchange is attractive (no counterparty risk, no fees, no waiting weeks for document verification, no limits).
Right now today it's possible for me and you to trade millions of dollars worth of tokens such as WINGS, BAT, USD.DC, GNO with each other on https://etherdelta.github.io or https://oasisdex.com/ (and soon https://ubitok.io/) - without needing to get verified or sign up, and only needing to trust that the exchange smart contract behaves as claimed (well, and that we're interacting with the right contract!).
If you don't see smart contracts / decentralised apps working well here, are there any problems where you do see them as being a good solution? A distributed exchange always seemed to me like a bit of a poster child for smart contracts ...
What I don't follow is why Ethereum is a good target to implement this type of program on. If you have the know-how to implement a bulletproof/trustable multi-token transaction clearing platform, why would you want to tie yourself to this platform?
The only advantage I see for smart contracts is that it would allow you to implement security-like mechanisms without regulatory burden associated with the SEC and other financial entities.
Apart from this "new world" thing, in what concrete ways is using an etherium based exchange more advantageous for me-user than traditional financial organisms who must submit to oversight and scrutiny with safeguards in place to prevent hostile behaviour from my peers?
A smart contract cannot hold USD because it doesn't exist on a blockchain. With USD, all you get is credit, and going through a Blockchain when the weak link is the USD debitor doesn't make much sense (blockchains are decentralized, credit is inherently centralized).
Secondly, blockchains are generally too slow due to their broadcast-all nature. There's really no reason to broadcast my coffee purchase to the entire world so they can embed it in history for all eternity. The merchant and me can keep the receipt if we want, but there's little reason for anyone else to participate, particularly if we want to do it cheaply/efficiently.
IOU exchanges are just postponing the real problem, that the gateway to the legacy system (Fiat). With gateways converting and issuing IOUs to Fiat you make the gateway to the actual exchange including all problems of trust and security.
You define centralized exchanges as banks (as they are usually).
A decentralized exchange has a different model. There is no credit and IOU conversion but a direct exchange of BTC to Fiat (or other altcoin). For escrowing the trade amount we use Bitcoins Multi-signature feature so the blockchain is the escrow.
Here is a basic overview about the process:
https://bisq.io/overview.png
Fiat transfer systems are typically unreliable. They can be intercepted, halted, delayed, reversed, and generally cannot be considered objectively predictable, with a wide variety of unique and nontrivial failure modes - not all of which are recoverable - and no objective SLA / service description.
The problem with assuming good faith and using actor reputation (even third-party arbitrated) is that, in becoming a trusted actor, the amount of money available for cut-and-run scenarios increases exponentially (both for arbitrator and actor), until it ultimately makes sense and happens (eg. numerous scam darknet markets, etc.)... often the claim is "sorry we got hacked!"
Using real world user identities as insurance has the issue that using one's fiat bank account to perform automated or semi-automated trades on behalf of others is probably dubious to against terms of service, or at a minimum vaguely arguably so when politically expedient. Therefore, revealing the real world user identity of an accused bad actor (ie. fiat account holder) as an insurance against bad behavior is likely to expose them to an undue scale of legal hassle and/or asset seizure, which is not something wise to trust a third party with no matter how trustworthy the arbitrators are supposed to be.
My gut feeling is that such systems work only at small scale, with a veneer of trust that can be established in different ways: deposit is placed with counterparty, reputation within some shared community, mafia boss will murder you if you rip off the system, etc. Between absolute strangers, it is exceptionally difficult to reliably scale, even if you can establish it.
Finally, an important point is that frequent <1BTC transfer activity to random destinations on conventional fiat accounts are likely to trigger bank anti money laundering (AML) heuristics.
This is interesting, but I could see some possible issues.
It would be fun to ask the Devs some questions.
eg: if peers are able to select their arbitrators, how do you prevent a peer and & arbitrator from gaming the system. There is a secondary arbitrator but from the docs it looks like after the initial arbitration the funds are released.
Is there a way to protect against root DHT node hijack? Only refernce I see to this is a TODO: See how btc does this.
The defense mechanism chosen is to make arbitrators pay a high registration fee, so that it would supposedly cost them more to trick the system than they would win (because of the 1btc trade limit). To be noted is that current arbitrators are handpicked by founders, but they want it to be fully decentralized ultimately.
What is not addressed is this : if arbitrator management is fully decentralized, how will people be triggering their safety payment if they do something bad? Will there be some kind of a vote or something? How much time would it takes? (because if it's long enough, malicious arbitrator can steal money from several trades and outperform their safety deposit). It seems like the hardest part to decentralize, and I don't think it's addressed well enough yet.
In short: The arbitrator will have to lockup a high amount of BSQ (DAO tokens)and in case he would default that deposit can get confiscated by voting.
He also is limited to do not more than 20 cases.
Yes the trader can select his arbitrator.
The arbitration system got a conceptual change with the upcoming DAO and will be secured by locked up security deposit of the arbitrator as well as an introduction of a mediator who will cover most cases and who has no key to the 2of3 MS.
See: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DXEVEfk4x1qN6QgIcb2PjZwU...
Most arbitration cases are customer care cases and there have been actually no real dispute at all where the traders delivered conflicting statements.
We use PageSigner/TLSNotary (https://tlsnotary.org/) for the case that traders have a real dispute. With that we can get a tamper evident proof if the bank transfer took place.
WE don't use a DHT but a custom P2P network based on a floodfill algorithm. All traffic is routed over Tor and each node is a hidden service.
Huh. I thought I saw in the documentation there are references to securing the master DHT, though I did see references to something called TomP2P. I'm no in a place where I can go back through the documentation for this though.
My original question I think still applies how every so I'll try and rephrase it: Is there a way to secure the Peer Discovery service in such a to secure against creating a secondary network of peers, then running a bookkeepers odds scheme. (Using the secondary marketplace as an options market for transactions on the first)
Which doc are you referring? We used a DHT in early days but that was long before the launch. Maybe I oversaw to update at some place...
There are 4 seed nodes to which you connect randomly at startup. They deliver you all known onion addresses in the network. From that list you select randomly peers until u have 8 connections. You also maintain your local peer list which will be used at follow up startups. I don't see a way how to partition the network. You get random incoming connections as well (e.g. if one takes your offer). The floodfill network architecture is very robust against eclipse attacks (dht problems) and partitioning. Thats why a floodfill architecture is used on Bitcoin as well.
Are there currently any ERC tokens with applicable utility other than wild speculation and claims about unproven future features which the ERC20 tokens are created in completely arbitrary (artificial scarcity, sidestepping SEC IPO investments) limited amounts for?
If some of these projects go on to produce open source software of worth it won't all be for nothing.
Associating the ERC-20 protocol with the current mania and nonsense of cryptocurrencies doesn't seem fair. It's simply a method of creating a sub-currency, which yes is often unnecessary but marketing is a powerful force so it happens.
Having seen small rural communities try and fail to create their own local currency years ago it's only a matter of time before some try again digitally.
It may have changed since the last time I used this, but here's how it works:
1. There are two sides to a trade, Alice and Bob.
2. Alice has USD and Bob has Bitcoins.
3. Both sides wish to trade money but they don't trust each other.
4. To do this, they deposit collateral in the form of Bitcoins into a escrow
account (multiple mediators need to sign to give back the collateral to their owners.)
This is a bond separate from the money they are already trading.
5. Alice sends her USD to Bob.
6. Bob sends his Bitcoins to Alice.
7. If either side cheated the mediators won't sign
the "check" to release funds from the Escrow account.
Therefore, so long as the value of the collateral is
worth more than their potential profit from scamming
-- there is no incentive to scam.
In BitSquare step 4 I think is done with third-party mediators and the mediators make decisions based on evidence. So first, how do you prove that a user sent Bitcoin: easy, its on the blockchain. Second, how do you prove that a user sent USD? Well, I believe BitSquare uses something called "TLS Notaries" -- this allows a person to cryptographically prove that an SSL website was in their browser, potentially enabling a person to prove that they sent funds.
As you can see this scheme has a few problems:
1. Users are required to have Bitcoins for collateral.
So if you don't already have Bitcoins you can't buy
any (strange scenario.)
2. It relies on collateral, period, so you can never
buy and sell the full amount of funds that you have.
3. Liquidity is poor. BitSquare could be improved if
they had more investors and structured the exchange
to provide liquidity themselves at a premium.
4. It's unclear how secure the notaries are and whether
or not it can be cheated.
5. Reputation isn't that secure and the model
doesn't account for attackers, though I think
BitSquare solves this with multiple mediators.
Another option to solve the same problem is to use micro-payment channels. A service would have credit that represented a USD balance and micro-amounts of this balance would be sent to the recipient as the sender receives micro-amounts of Bitcoin. This is a better model, IMO, but still can potentially be reversed.
It's good to see that BitSquare is still around though. Decentralized exchanges haven't had much adoption so far and I haven't seen anyone who nailed every usability problem that these exchanges have. Even assets on Ethereum where you can literally write simple code that says "a transfer occurs if two users agree to it" are traded on "decentralized exchanges" with multiple vulnerabilities and bad UX for traders.
Thanks for the summary. Just to make it clear, if either party refuses to sign the escrow release, then neither of them gets the escrow-ed funds? If so, then doesn't that mean that I lose out on 2X money when the other party fails to pay me X (I send them X and I lose X or more from the escrow)? If not, then doesn't that mean that a "troll" can refuse to sign after a trade just to screw me out of X? Or am I missing something?
This is the same problem that BitHalo has (in my opinion.) But the escrow step for Bitsquare is done with multiple third-party mediators instead of between the users. This has problems of its own because now you have to trust that the mediators are going to act honestly (and pseudo-anonymous reputation systems don't reveal what prior relationships might exist between actors.)
I guess the assumption here is that reputation is good enough.
At the moment I (the founder) is the only arbitrator as the project has not implemented the fully decentralized arbitration system. We recently changed the concept how to get there with using a high security deposit in BSQ tokens (DAO tokens) which the arbitrator need to lock up. In case he would cheat he would risk that his deposit get confiscated by voting of the DAO stakeholders.
There will be also introduced mediators who don't have the 3rd key, and who are handling the big majority of cases (customer care, there have been basically no real disputes so far).
See https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DXEVEfk4x1qN6QgIcb2PjZwU...
for more details...
We did not had time to update all the information on the web page and older documents to reflect the new concept.
Coould you have a decentralised p2p fiat <-> ETH exchange with a smart contract and PayPal, where the sold ETH is being held on the smart contract until PayPal transfer from buyer to seller is verified by the smart contract?
Paypal will never cooperate this, because the service is selling money laundering. Without Paypal's cooperation, you can't guarantee that a transaction presently honored by Paypal will not be reversed in the future, for reasons including "the buyer, who legitimately controlled the Paypal account at time of transaction, decided to defraud the seller" and "the buyer, who has credentials for X,000 Paypal accounts obtained by hacking, does not have the authority to commit either the Paypal account or Paypal to a transaction."
If the traffic to PayPal confirming the transaction wasn't from a centralised server, PayPal would have no way of differentiating between an ETH sale or any other transaction, so their cooperation might not be needed.
Reversal - might be better solutions but couldn't the smart contract escrow simply have a timer built in that would allow the fiat receiver to move the money out of his PayPal account, thus preventing reversal?
I'm just running with a half-baked idea, but it feels like it could work. Doesn't need to be PayPal, could be any fiat transaction provider that has an API that allows confirmation of the fiat transfer that the smart contract can access
The fundamental problem with this is the same problem Ethereum has - the hooks to the real world aren't very good. Making them better implies trusting a third party. If you have to trust a third party, why do you need this?
Yes, that's been my worry with many blockchain projects - it all sounds great until it needs to interface with the messy real-world.
But - regardless of the merits of this particular project - I think there is still some benefit in having a decentralised cryptocurrency exchange even if it doesn't totally eliminate the need for trust. Provided it reduces the scope of what needs to be trusted, or makes it easier to audit, or reduces how often it needs to be trusted, then that's still an improvement.
Suppose you want to sell some ethereum-based FOO tokens for US Dollars in your bank account.
Now, you could trust a centralised exchange to do the whole thing and hope they don't get hacked / run off with your money / steal your identity docs / take weeks to verify you / get shut down by regulators. And cough up the 0.25% fees.
Or, with a decentralised exchange, you can split your problem into two problems:
1. finding someone willing to exchange your Ethereum FOO token for an Ethereum tethered-USD token
2. finding someone willing to exchange Ethereum tethered-USD tokens for bank account USD.
Part 1 is purely Ethereum-based, and this is where competition should drive fees down to near-zero. Because a smart-contract can run this, there's almost no need to trust - this can be done on-chain.
Part 2 is where you have a point - there is still some trust required. But we don't need to trust the tethered-USD processor in Part 2 nearly as much as a full-fledged exchange - and they're easier to audit. There's also a lot less to go wrong - they're not dealing with lots of different crypto-currencies and networks, all they have to do is burn Ethereum tethered-USD tokens in exchange for real USD in a bank account. Fees should be lower, you'd hope.
Also, eventually we might get to the point where part 2 isn't needed - if you can spend tethered-USD tokens in enough places, why would you need banking-system-USD?
Disclaimer: I'm involved with the https://ubitok.io decentralised Ethereum exchange so I do have a bit of a vested interest in decentralised exchanges! Would love to hear some counter opinions though ..
The assets traded on the bitshares exchange are derivatives backed by the value of the BTS token. This is how counterparty risk is eliminated. Bitsquare is like openbazaar but only for cryptocurrency. Personally, I'm very skeptical the approach will work in practice.
That's if you want to trade in real-time, but a slow decentralized exchange still has value for casual buyers and sellers. An exchange is typically both a trading platform and a marketplace, but it doesn't have to do both to be useful.
In my opinion the frictionless exchange between cryptos and fiat will become important for real world use cases which don't need to be done in milliseconds but rather seconds
I get it. I like it, but I wouldn't use it just yet. I think the fees charged by most exchanges are low enough for me not to worry. Also there is a large amount of legal bureaucracy now happening over real money exchanges, how might that affect it?
How so? HFT generally provides liquidity and is arguably a good thing, for people wanting to execute infrequent trades, on otherwise thin volume markets.
I feel there is already a decentralized exchange: openbazaar. That has the advantage of a decentralized reputation system and a head start in network effects.
Yes, https://etherdelta.github.io/ were way ahead of everyone else, if someone asks me for an example of an Ethereum contract that's solving a real world problem right now then they're the first one I think of.
It's a shame that Ethereum tokens are getting a bit of a bad reputation, because an exchange like EtherDelta coupled with asset-backed tokens could really open up all kinds of possibilities.
Disclaimer: I'm involved with https://ubitok.io which are similar to EtherDelta (but /totally/ on-chain, no off-chain matching engine needed!)
As there is no concept of arbitrator reputation, it makes
no sense to deselect arbitrators, as this will only
reduce his trading possibilities. Traders will only be
able to take offers of users with whom they have at least
one overlapping selected arbitrator
It looks like this is only required for withdrawing to a national currency (USD, EUR, etc). Being able to trade between altcoins trustlessly is pretty neat.
Just finished watching their video and got nothing other than "Read our white paper if you're interested", plus bunch of buzzwords.
Why make the video at all? If I were them I would scrap all the bullshit and just spend the two minutes in the video explaining the basics of WHY and HOW it works. People visiting that site already know what a "decentralized bitcoin exchange" is.
By running Bisq on their local machines, users form a peer-to-peer network. Offers to buy and sell bitcoin are broadcast to that network, and through the process of offering and accepting these trades via the Bisq UI, a market is established.
There are no central points of control or failure in the Bisq network. There are no trusted third parties. When two parties agree to trade national currency for bitcoin, the bitcoin to be bought or sold is held in escrow using multisignature transaction capabilities native to the bitcoin protocol.
Because the national currency portion of any trade must be transferred via traditional means such as a wire transfer, Bisq incorporates first-class support for human arbitration to resolve any errors or disputes.
That's the "definition" of a decentralized bitcoin exchange, not an explanation, which means I already knew all that even before I clicked through the link. a decentralized bitcoin exchange is not a novel concept, anyone would have thought of the concept itself (you just need to take "bitcoin exchange" and think "what if it was decentralized?") and anyone could claim to have solved the problem, but what really matters is execution. None of that is in the video as well as on the website itself, almost feels like they're hiding behind their "white paper" just like a lot of academics write their dissertation in intentionally hard-to-understand manner so they won't get criticized easily.
It also doesn't help they have that immature quote "To change something, build a model that makes the existing model obsolete" as their tagline, which has nothing to do with the hypothetical value they claim to provide.
Just some formatting help so that people can read this:
>By running Bisq on their local machines, users form a peer-to-peer network. Offers to buy and sell bitcoin are broadcast to that network, and through the process of offering and accepting these trades via the Bisq UI, a market is established.
>There are no central points of control or failure in the Bisq network. There are no trusted third parties. When two parties agree to trade national currency for bitcoin, the bitcoin to be bought or sold is held in escrow using multisignature transaction capabilities native to the bitcoin protocol.
>Because the national currency portion of any trade must be transferred via traditional means such as a wire transfer, Bisq incorporates first-class support for human arbitration to resolve any errors or disputes.
I felt the same way. There are so many open questions after watching the video.
How do I get my Euros to someone selling me bitcoin? Is there a central bank account everyone deposits the money? Some cryptocurrencies like Stellar have a built-in decentralised exchange[1]. They solve the problem of getting fiat into the system through anchors[2]. I wonder if there is a better way.
You send fiat money to the trading peer using e. g. SEPA, OKPay, national bank transfer, ClearXchange and some other methods. There is no central bank account and Bisq does not control any money and can thus not steal any money.
It helps a lot to understand what it does exactly and how, and we can see the development status (usable, but needs lots of cleanup) before installing the app.
I'm not sure I understand your position. "ignorance" and criticism are two different things. I'm assuming you missed the word here.
Secondly, do you feel there's no room for criticism just because something is provided for free? To me, the grandparents criticism is valid. Maybe it doesn't tell the whole story, I don't know, but it's a concern that deserves an answer. Any reasonable maintainer would welcome valif criticism; this is the process we use to make improvements. This is how software works in general (build something, show consumers, gather feedback, iterate) and literally how all of science works (peer review.)
Again, I don't understand your comment at all. I find your last sentence ironic in that your comment provides exactly zero value to a reader of this thread.
Examples:
https://medium.com/@TheAlexGalaxy/why-i-m-suing-td-canada-tr...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/comments/6guh...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zruvf/warning_cas...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1sglge/the_bank_ar...