Bitcoin Forum

Decentralized exchanges involving millions of wallets residing in smartphones and other devices, distributed around the world, will bring an end to “the war governments.”

https://bitcoinist.com/john-mcafee-predicts-that-advent-of-decentralized-exchanges-will-trigger-the-largest-economic-expansion-in-history/

He's a silly billy but he does have a point here. Exchanges are still overwhelmingly centralised with all the endless problems and bullshit that brings. I'm not sure how many people realise how rare non centralised exchanges are.

Bisq and equivalents will very much need to up their game on the fiat side of things though.

But on a fundamental level, decentralized exchanges seem incompatible with fiat money. A decentralized exchange should be trustless -- multi-sig contracts or similar can secure the trade. This can be extended to stablecoins, but stablecoins are funded with money that has already been deposited into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. We need to solve deposits and withdrawals to/from the fiat ecosystem.

How can this work with trusted third parties, like with bank transfers? How can a decentralized protocol verify that a P2P cash exchange actually occurred? It seems like these things require arbitrage mechanisms to settle trader disputes that can't be done on a trustless or decentralized basis.

Sounds more to me like a illusion. The existing decentralized exchange is not going on well, like Bisq is one example. I can't imagine how this will take off.

Wont really be that easy on having such transition and even though most people do really like to get rid of centralized exchangers due to anonymity issues but still we cant really avoid the fact between the difference of centralized ones and decentralized. Collaborating with fiat deposits and withdrawals would prefer the most and we are seeing the demand between them.Dex would just stay as it should be.

Yup and it's all just getting worse. Anonymous decentralized exchanges will be very appealing for many of us in the cryptocurrency world.

There has to be a p2p step for fiat and then you can go into the properly decentralised bit.

I've never used Bisq so I've no idea how their arbitration works. That's no doubt the bit that'll need plenty of refining. I don't think it can ever be A1 but it should become smoother overall.

LOL. I bet some rich businessmen will now start creating their own decentralized exchanges so hold on tight guys because we might be seeing millions created each month. I think the best McAfee can do is to stay away from the crypto and leave for good.

This is another way of John McAfee advertisement and we both know that the governments won't allow such things to happen cause almost all current exchanges are centralized not to talk of wallet. Every soon now John McAfee will eat what he said and this not his first time though.

Are those problems with centralized exchanges the reason why Bitcoin and other coins haven't made "largest economic expansion is history yet"? I seriously doubt that. For an average user, they can just move money it, get coins out and 99.9% of the time there won't be any problems.

Decentralized exchanges would be nice, but they too are not perfect, banks and payment companies control fiat, if they would want, they can disrupt the work of decentralized exchanges. Plus, they might be not able to compete with centralized exchanges in terms of fees - banks have something like 0.5-1% fees, that's pretty bad for trading.

For his statement two work I think he is under the impression of one he thinks that the majority of the governments of each country will allow decentralized exchanges to dominate the market and two is that majority of the population will become investors/traders in the cryptocurrency exchanges both of which is impossible to happen. Investing has been long made available to us yet still a small portion of the population only invest in assets. Also the government won't let the market be dominated by a decentralized exchange as they know a lot of security risk will happen not to mention a spike of criminal activity might happen more often.

I think that decentralized exchanges can't deal with fiat money. Traders should use an escrow service to transfer USD, EURO, etc.

The reliable way to exchange crypto currencies is an "atomic swap" function. I heard that Litecoin supports this feature. People often use the ShapeShift service to buy Bitcoins and other top rated crypto currencies without verification.

It should be mentioned that the Ethereum ERC20-tokens can be exchanged on Etherdelta. Currently this smart contract holds ETH and tokens worth more that 1 billion USD.

What of machine to machine stuff? At present that's borderline completely untapped but in the next few years there might be trillions of transactions taking place between machines every day and many of them will want to swap tokens and currencies.

That's not going to work if they have to log in to somewhere, validate the login, click on a bunch of fucking shopfronts or buses to actually get in to the site, and then start dicking around with order books.

There's a lot more than just boring baseline humans who'll get use out of crypto and that's likely to be where tit-exploding levels of boom will be fostered.

Hello Mr. McAfee. This is not 2014 - 2015 anymore when decentralize everything was still a popular phrase among the naive developers, which was mostly every developer, in the cryptospace.

He is 4 to 5 years too late. That stage of innocence is gone and it will never come back.

the fiat issue does seem problematic. anything you can't automate with smart contracts is problematic. can anyone explain how bisq works? who are these third party arbitrators and how are they chosen?


etherdelta is only quasi-decentralized. it's built on the DNS system with centralized servers. the site got hijacked last year when hackers replaced its DNS entry. lots of users got their private keys phished when they imported them.

But do you not think that as things get more centralised it becomes clearer why people were excited about it in the first place? Humans in general are stupid and short sighted. Only after they've been raped do they tend to realise why non rapey concepts might benefit them.

Like Internet of Things? That idea is considered overhyped by many experts, there are tons of problems while the benefits are not as big as its proponents may claim. Generally, people are not really good at predicting the future of technology, they expect too much from one things (flying cars) and fail to predict the others (smartphones). I'm generally skeptical about big predictions, and when they come from people like McAfee, I'm twice as skeptical.

" If the exchange is distributed across 20 million wallets on smartphones and laptops and pads, then what do you do?" - Let's

answer his question. You simply target the mobile phone service providers, because they are centralized too and most

countries have very strict regulations to govern these companies. This is why technologies like M-Pesa is inferior to Bitcoin,

because it mostly runs on centralized mobile phones and centralized service providers. Governments will target platforms

under their control.  >:(

What if people encrypt their communications, though? How would the mobile phone service providers or ISPs know that Bitcoin transactions are taking place? That seems like the first step.

Also, I think wireless mesh networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network) could be relevant here. It's an infrastructure for routing that doesn't need to be centralized.

I would like that in this case the predictions of McAfee come true and in five years there are only decentralized exchangers of crypto currency. If centralized exchangers send information about their clients to various government bodies, it is quite possible that a significant part of the owners of crypto currency will switch to the use of decentralized exchangers.

As far as I understand, Bisq is a peer-to-peer exchange

In my opinion, this is not a true exchange. We need "exchanges" working right on the blockchain where "exchange" is built-in on the protocol level. I understand that it is not possible to make such an exchange real-time with current implementations. We need second-layer solutions like LN that would allow real-time orderbooks with real-time trades, just like regular exchanges work. Obviously, all exchangeable coins should have the same protocol that would allow trading different coins (so-called atomic swaps) since implementing this technology with just one coin makes no sense. Trading always involves two currencies, be it a cryptocurrency-to-fiat or cryptocurrency-to-cryptocurrency exchange. With fiat, we need payment gateways, that further complicates things but I think it is doable

However, we have also made a hard realization that not every network or system is required to be decentralized and to issue its own tokens.

You have started investing in the cryptospace longer than me, you know that this is true.

Going to decentralized exchanges will become more and more of a trend into the future, especially when regulations are tightening on centralized exchanges to the point where without going through some really hassled verification measures, you can't even use and access their service.

We're already seeing this with some exchanges even asking for proof of source of funds, which is just absolutely absurd.

Though, I don't think that large scale, working decentralized exchanges will necessarily come around any time soon since integration with the fiat economy would be difficult. And even when they do become mainstream, "largest economic expansion in history" is far fetched.

Personally, I don't think that the integration of decentralized exchanges with fiat gateways will be difficult

Besides, I don't think it is an issue at all. If you need fiat for your daily expenses (like groceries, at barber's, etc) you can cash out at regular exchanges and exchangers, or use Tether if you are looking for a fiat backup. But for many people, cryptocurrency conversions are the most required operation, and with Bitcoin stabilizing, who would need fiat anyway? Also, if fiat is going to kick the bucket one day (highly unlikely, but still), then this issue will get resolved on its own as you would no longer need it and consequently fiat gateways and exchanges as well

interesting discussion as DEX are somewhat lagging behind classical ones.