Bitcoin Forum

http://youtu.be/2_h9ZZwhwBg

The latest major Mycelium feature, called Local Trader, is finally out of beta and available to everyone.

With Local Trader, the development team at Mycelium sought to answer a question often posed by those new to bitcoin: Now that I have a bitcoin wallet, how do I get some bitcoins?

Local Trader lets those who already have bitcoins to offer them for sale, and those who are looking to obtain bitcoins an easy to use interface to find those sellers in their area. This allows sellers  to support their local Bitcoin economy and earn a little in the process.

Local Trader at a glance:

• All trades are person-to-person with cash for BTC.
• The servers mediating the trades hold no bitcoins or fiat.
• Bitcoin sellers create geographically pinned sell orders where they sell at a chosen exchange rate +/- a percentage.
• Bitcoin buyers can search for sell offers geographically, look for the best deals, and start a trade session.
• All trades use in-app end-to-end encrypted chat between the buyer and seller. Not even the Local Trader servers can read the contents.
• Buyer and seller can negotiate price and meeting place.
• As with the Mycelium Bitcoin Wallet, the source code of the Local Trader feature is open for review. You can compile and roll your own.
• The seller does not need to put funds into escrow; they are spent directly from his Mycelium Wallet.
• The buyer does not have to wait for confirmations - our revolutionary transaction confidence graph provides additional feedback on whether the transaction will in fact go through.
• A small 0.2% fee per side of the deal goes to supporting the infrastructure that we provide.

Initially, the trader options will be limited to standing sell offers and instant buy offers. Meaning only those who wish to offer to sell bitcoins for local currency will be able to create standing offers for buyers to search through. Later on, Local Trader will also add standing buy offers, for those who wish to offer the option of converting bitcoins to other currencies as well.

To enhance privacy, Local Trader eschews the login and password authentication method, and instead uses your wallet's private key to register and authenticate with the server, using the well established bitcoin key message signing feature. Also, all communication between buyers and sellers, such as when and where to meet, is encrypted using the traders' respective private keys. This means that the Mycelium servers that manage trades only know the bitcoin addresses, pseudonyms, coarse location, and trade history of the people involved, in effect making the system almost as pseudonymous as Bitcoin itself from the company's point of view.

Finally, when the traders meet and exchange cash, Mycelium's other new feature, the transaction confidence graph (currently limited to Local Trader) goes into effect, displaying the probability that the transaction that sends coins to the buyer's wallet will get included in the next block. To achieve this, Mycelium servers track the transaction as it propagates through thousands of nodes, as well as check it for possible double-spends, transaction malleability, long chains of unconfirmed inputs, proper transaction fees, and other possible issues. With this, traders can exchange cash and be on their way, fairly confident that the transaction was legitimate, without having to wait 10 minutes for a confirmation.

With the recent issues involving centralized exchanges shutting down or running away with money, and governments forcefully shutting down methods of getting money into exchanges, Mycelium hopes that this new feature will let anyone be a walking ATM, making exchanging bitcoins for other currencies much easier, and allowing traders to earn a bit of money in the process.

You can download the most recent verson from Google Play store here (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mycelium.wallet), or directly from mycelium.com (http://mycelium.com/).

Fore more info and HOWTO refer to: http://www.mycelium.com/lt/help.html

TL;DR: This is the most decentralized exchange you can use today. Decentralize ALL the things.

This IS awesome.
Tried it out on Thursday. We did a small $5 trade.
Can even chat with each other and sends notifications to your phone.
I WILL be using lots and lots.

Haha awesome video.

It is basically a localbitcoin right ?

Yes, but with some important differences. You don't trust our service with holding your BTC. Your coins are in your wallet, and only you control the private key. There is not copy/pasting Bitcoin addresses, the wallet is integrated with Local Trader giving both the buyer and seller a seamless trading experience. The fee is much lower, 0.2% of both sides of the deal. It is mobile, bring your wallet where ever you go. There is no username / password, authentication is done using Bitcoin message signing. End-to-end encrypted real-time chat, not even the Local Trader server can read your chat messages.

We need your help to make it a success. Install the app, make a sell ad, and support Bitcoin in your area by selling some coins and make a small optional profit while doing so.

But is it only an Android app ? No website ?

Right now it is only available for Android.
Using a dedicated device for Bitcoin is absolutely recommended, and they are very cheap these days:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23l23z/25_dollar_android_wallet/

We are currently investigating how this can be web-enabled while maintaining end-to-end trade chat encryption and asymmetric key authentication.
(sneak-peek: http://imgur.com/qauCpqT)

It's only showing USD value in ad. -_-

When you create an ad the currency used is the same as the currency selected in the Mycelium settings.
We are going to make it possible to change it directly when creating an ad

Works, thanks

What about the wallet security ?
How safe is it?

The wallet is as safe as the device you are running it on.
The private keys are 100% in your control and only leave the device when you make a backup/export (remember to make a backup!)
As with any network connected wallet you should only keep the amounts you need on a daily basis in your wallet. Keep the rest offline. Personally I store my stash on paper and use a dedicated device for cold-storage-spending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV-29RFU6xA

Any update ?

Unless things have changed drastically from the testnet beta version, buyer/seller ratings don't exist. Certainly not in the way the video suggests.

The backend system tracks reputation based on trades completed and aborted. There is no option to negatively rate a trade that was completed.

But that is better than nothing. If you see the guy IRL you can always aboard the trade.

Sorry, wasn't updating this thread. Lots of stuff going on.

A few stat points:

• There are right now 1586 active ads all over the world, mostly in US + Europe. This map lists them all: http://www.mycelium.com/lt/m/
• More than 300 trades have occurred with just below 300 BTC being traded (it is still early days, but we are gaining momentum).

You can now make ads for buying BTC (released 2 weeks ago) as well as selling BTC.

We are sending out an update this week that allows you to:

• Get email notifications in addition to 'Google Cloud Messaging' notifications when trade activity occurs
• See how long time ago a trader was active
• See the price of your ad (dynamically) while you update your premium/base rate
• Plus many small fixes and enhancements

There was one, but it quickly scrolled off the first page: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=611456.msg6764480