Bitcoin Forum

Let's consider both LocalBitcoins.com and Paxful as marketplaces where you can trade bitcoin for a myriad of other payment methods. Let's consider both platforms from the buyers' and sellers' perspectives as well. Both their ratings on BitTrust disappoint, both are rated approximately at ~2.4/5:

http://bittrust.org/localbitcoinscom
http://bittrust.org/paxful

Is it BitTrust, the trading platform themselves, or the people who rate the services?

The funny thing is, when I checked them also on BitTrust a few months back, the ratings were like ~3/5 for LocalBitcoins.com and ~4/5 for Paxful. Now they are equal, equally worse. I understand that certain amount is risk or fraud is inherent to these platforms, caution is required, or we may call them a minefield as well, depending on your perspective.

I just remember reading posts back in the days how Paxful is trying to get this marketplace thing right, how it tries to be better than LocalBitcoins.com. They even wrote this sketchy(?) piece on Medium: https://medium.com/@paxful/i-m-3-108-closer-to-paying-off-my-college-debt-by-selling-bitcoin-bf3aadc60f08
But is there any truth to it? It's on Medium, so.

All in all which is the best social trading platform like these? Some recommend Mycelium Local Trader, but that's certainly a different, much more constrained environment.

I realized most of the discussion about LocalBitcoins.com and Paxful are in the Exchanges (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=223.0) forum. I thought they are trading platforms. What to do now? Perhaps, we should move the topic over to the Exchanges branch?

I would argue that localbitcoins is far more popular than that review site.  It has been around for years and tons of people use it with no issues.

They are both peer to peer marketplaces so there will always be some scammers.  Also consider that none of the people who have a good experience on these websites have a reason to look for bitcoin exchange review websites, it is the few that have a bad experience who go out of their way to leave reviews on other websites.

There are all kinds of review sites out there (not mentioning Amazon and TripAdvisor, but let's take Trustpilot) where people leave all kinds of reviews, some of them are even stellar. So, I your logic doesn't fully add up to me, sorry, maybe it's just me. Sure, LocalBitcoins.com is the market leader, but I've read Paxful aimed to add improvements, remove frictions.

Is this topic about trading or exchanges (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1620014.msg16284529#msg16284529), by the way?

Wow. Mr. moderator has moved my topic to Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Marketplace > Service Discussion > Exchanges, thanks for him! anyone has to add anything to this? I thought you have more to say.

I'm sorry to say but the argument that only people who have grievances rate a product is pretty weak. I mean, look at all those reviews on Amazon or TripAdvisor... or even sites like TrustPilot or BitTrust. They are in the full range, good and bad reviews, too. Yes, it's easier to leave reviews on Amazon, you sing up to shop, but on the other sites?

Come on, guys! I expected better discussion from the premiere bitcoin community!

I wouldn't get involved in Paxful myself as both their CEO and CTO got arrested a few months back for having weapons and cocaine in Miami. LocalBitcoins is probably the most used out there but I don't like it due the fact that we need to provide some real life information's.
I prefer using Bitcointalk (currency exchange) as a trading platform all of the time as It's not that hard to spot scammers and there is a lot of DefaultTrust members who are active in that section which make it easy to do business with them without worrying much.

@OmegaStarScream thanks for your this informative post because today I was going to create open accounts on these both sites for trading but now realize this forum is much better and safe place for buying/selling of bitcoins

The bad reviews might not have anything to do with the actual product/service of the company. I have noticed that there are multiple trolls in the Bitrust-website giving bad reviews for companies. It's easy to notice this from the spammed reviews that have been created with the same Alias during the same day and for some reason all the good reviews don't get through.

Thanks for the info, I didn't know this.

What I had in mind is to do some business in Amazon Gift Cards, me buying their cards for bitcoin, a high risk business for me. Paxful seemed to be the place for that, this forum isn't. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Any ideas for this?

I tend to disagree on this one , digital goods section is more then enough to run any of your businesses. As long as they are legit , trusted and of course a good (or let's say a competitive) price , a lot of people will come to you whether you are a buyer or a seller . Just check the section and If you are buying then make a thread about it + search the selling threads out there.