Bitcoin Forum

Have there been any major developments or attempts to make a p2p exchange? Something to trade altcoins and be automatic like a fully function exchange yet you hold your keys until you trade?

Possible but I don't think it's ever been done

I predict this model will not work. exchanging currency and exchanging goods are fundamentally different.

there are/were 5-10 projects around. you can find many threads on the topic going back to 2011 or so. mastercoin will be launching in a couple of days. there is ripple as well, which is not trustless in my opinion.

https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC
https://github.com/ripple
https://github.com/bitcoinx
https://github.com/Open-Transactions
https://github.com/p2p/bitcoin-exchange
https://github.com/InvictusInnovations

see also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iir3_dYmK8
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/11116/what-is-the-definition-of-a-p2p-exchange

Altcoin might be possible... still there are often challenges of locking funds and the "you go first - no YOU go first!" issues.

BTC <--> fiat usually is not possible since fiat is not as electronically transferable as BTC. That's after all one of the reasons Bitcoin was invented in the first place.

Would something similar to libertyreserve work for USD fiat where there are exchanges in between you that would exchange USD for a the libertyreserve currency that was pegged to the US dollar. Only difference would be to make it a crypto coin that is pegged to USD. The exchange then would issue 1 dollar in the crypto coin and sell it with a small fee. They would make money from the fees and the coins sold would be able to reclaim there cyrptocoins for the original dollar they paid. Of course you would need to pay $1.02 or something to get $1 of this crypto currency.

The advantage is there is no exchange to hack, the USD cryptocurrency is backed by real dollars that are stored safely in a bank account, the dollars have fdic insurance, since the funds are in a bank account they aren't easy to steal, since its a USD cryptocurrency it is transparent and clear how many coins are issued and if the company is solvent.

How does ripple work its always been a e-web wallet and the bitcoins are iou's. Heard of mastercoin it goes untop of bitcoin. Never heard of the other ones.

yes.


https://www.counterparty.co/about/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.0

As of today you can trade BTC for XCP and back to BTC or XBTC, over the DEX whilst taking advantage of automatic escrow. Of course you can also trade any altcoin or indeed create your own assets for trading completely p2p. You can see a list of assets users have already issued for trading below. http://www.blockscan.com/asset.aspx

Sure you can release your own USDcoin just hope you don't end up like the admins of Liberty Reserve and arrested. The problem is users on the p2p exchange can trade between each other USDcoins without notifying the issuing entity and therefore not providing any KYC info. OKpay has a centralized server so everybody is identified and they can freeze transactions for more info, but USDcoin you'd only have to download a wallet and trade away with no identification. This would be epic awesome if we could do this but sadly governments won't allow it anywhere unless you have a bank account in Belarus or other financial embargo country

Colored coins are kind of like what you are describing, so is Open Transactions where you can release your own currencies. Won't ever happen unless you find a shady country that doesn't care about US and European pressure to shut it down. Gold could be a possibility because of different regulations, Pecunix is still around.

Got to wait until digital currencies rule the world and the majority of merchants accept BTC, LTC, etc... then there's no need to convert any to fiat. Problem solved but that day is what we dream for, maybe 20 or 50 years in times. Currently fiat still the king as "Cash is still king!"

Wont't P2P exchanges bloat the blockchain even more?

Nope, CounterParty (XCP) P2P DEX currently uses multisig transactions as a means of escrow, with advent of Bitcoin 0.9 it will transition seamlessly to implementing OP_RETURN which can be pruned

I just heard of mastercoin,ripple,3i.

But it will still be put onto the blockchain, a full node would still need it.

You just described it nearly perfect here:
Just replace "exchanges similar to libertyreserve" with "gateways" and "crypto coin" with "IOU/balance on Ripple" and you have described Ripple already quite well. Others (like Mastercoin, Colored coins...) work similarly I guess.

How does counterpart work on the bitcoin block chain does it waste space on the bitcoin blockchain?

I am having trouble understanding ripple is it centralized or decentralized?

Depends on which part you mean:

XRP, the currency that is used to pay fees in, is centrally issued. You can get some for free/cheap but that's about it.

Trading goods on Ripple are IOUs/balances - they have an issuer/counterparty. Anyone can be one, but not everybody will trust anyone, there is some equilibrium there to have at least a few bigger players. Not sure if you'd call that "centralized" or not.

Ripple in the sense of the order book is definitely decentralized, though a lot of trades are done in/against XRP, there is absolutely nothing forcing you to do so and you can easily and freely trade anything with anyone - no questions asked.

Infrastructure wise, it is mostly decentralized too - rippled (the server) is out now for about half a year and it's not hard at all to set one up yourself. Be aware that getting full history means a lot more data to store than on Bitcoin though. It's fairly easy to just use it to trade though and it can run as full node within minutes if you don't need all that history stuff.

Validator wise (the "mining" equivalent of Ripple to prevent double spends) it's a bit worse - while there are about as many running and different validators out there as there are mining pools in Bitcoin, to really call it "decentralized" I'd guess there needs to be better tools as well as more diversity out there than right now. Here most of the nodes seem to trust only RippleLabs by default (a reasonable choice for sure, but not for long term). I'd not call it completely centralized there (especially since the network could easily continue with RippleLabs' servers failing), but there can and will be improvements on that front this year.

See,

Will you build an Open Source decentralized cryptocurrency exchange?

http://www.rugatu.com/questions/16410/will-you-build-an-open-source-decentralized-cryptocurrency-exchange

asked 16 Apr '13, 21:16

Thanks for the link