Hey, right now the main focus is cash trades so we just wanted to know specifically what you don't like about the current platform you use when it comes to cash trading.

If you want to get a little more detail about our platform to make a comment, I made another topic where I can explain better  the features  : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5318881.msg56400337#msg56400337


Appreciate the response. I understand and agree with your points but we are starting out with a centralized website because we think it is more user friendly and simpler to start with. We want a simple google search, and you are there. (there is also already enough hoops for a beginner with understanding how to use multi-sig wallet for the first time). We don't think we are losing that much by running on a website in terms of security and privacy as long as everyone has access to the code. We will collect only the necessary data and will flush unnecessary data after x amount of time.

@o_e_l_e_o What would be your main concern about using a website instead of an application?



Yes, that is a very good point for online trades, more so then cash traders where we encourage outside communication. After you've traded with someone online enough times, you don't want to pay the platform fee and tend to push the communication/trading to a messaging app. I do it. I know most big time traders do it. But why?

The good about trading directly once you've done a couple of trades with someone:
1. No platform fee, only the transaction fee
2. You can decide the anonymity of your communications (auto-delete messages, encryption, etc...)

The bad:
1. Someone has to risk getting scammed after sending first. With a 1% platform fee, you have to do about 100 trades until you can "afford" to be scammed once
2. Won't hurt the scammers' reputation on the platform if you trade directly. Because you can't leave feedback
3. Inefficient trade. It is quite annoying to trade on wechat, whatsapp... because you have to agree on a btc price provider, lock the rate, calculate the amount that needs to be sent +/- the rate, send the btc address, send the btc, check when it arrives and if the amount is right, etc...

I would be lying if I said I don't do it BUT that is part of the reason we started the platform. We are focusing on the good and fixing the bad. For the risk of getting scammed when trading directly, we are offering a multi-sig escrow wallet with an option to dispute. All disputes will be reviewed by an admin who actually traded/used the payment method before and not some random customer support agent. For the lack of reputation in direct trades, we have a feedback system. For the inefficient trading system involved in using texting apps, the platform offers an intuitive system to trade. And to fix these issues, the platform is still doing a good job of keeping trader's information as private and secure as possible, away from third parties' hands. Also, we haven't decided on an exact platform fee to charge but most payment methods will be less than 1% (and between us, it will be prob be 0.5% for most payment methods).

After all is said and done, if traders still want to communicate outside of the platform and drop their Signal/Ricochet/Telegram numbers, I don't think we'll ever block them. But we will warn all traders that this might hurt the dispute process and hurt them more than it will help them. So no more one22 7six3 eiggght 9too8 




Thanks for the responses guys. Keep em coming

I understand your point. I just don't think it would matter in the current topic since I'm asking cash traders what platform they use and what they don't like about it.

I still want to talk about your point because the fact that you distrust an anonymous developer is valid, so I'll tell you why I believe it it is better if I stay anonymous.


First, since this topic is about cash trades, I want to note that the platform has a really hands off approach on cash trades that is different than for online trades so the need for trusting the developer is small and you can check this topic if you want to know more about how we will offer cash trades : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5318881.0

Now, looking at the online trades where some level of trust is required, let me explain better what we are developing.
The platform we are making is a decentralized one which allows traders to do Fiat to BTC trades with the help of a 2 of 3 multi-sig wallet. We decided to go decentralized because
a. we wanted traders in control of their finances (no custodian)
b. we wanted to create a better p2p trading experience while limiting the admin's involvement
c. we wanted to provide the world an unrestricted platform (for ex. no KYC)

We welcome all traders and offer them an intuitive system that favors the honest trader. We won't hold any of the traders' funds and it is free to post an offer and open a trade.

The platform itself will be open source so anyone can review the code and decide if they trust the system we built or not. The need to trust a developer is old thinking, I personally think, you need to check the code that is being run and make sure it is not tampered with.

Therefore, in order to make a reputable platform that still follows the logic of Bitcoin, we are making a platform that does not gain a reputation by the founders' real names but by the fact that it is open source and has an incentive to stay honest because of the platform fees it charges.

Please let me know if you are satisfied with the explanation or if you still disagree, Thanks.

Are you asking about the platform's reputation or my reputation on Bitcointalk ? I'm personally keeping my ID private but I don't understand why you would ask that for this topic since I am only asking 2 questions to cash traders. Maybe you can elaborate a little more to help me understand.

Hello, I am building a p2p decentralized platform and would like to mainly know where cash traders typically find other cash traders. So, if you have a little bit of time, reply to this post with your answers to:

1. Where do you post (or find) cash trade offers ? Localbitcoins, Paxful, Bisq, Localcryptos, Bitcointalk, Craiglist, or...?

2. What is one thing you would like to change from the platform that you use now to make your experience better ?


I appreciate your time.

PS : If you are interested in learning more about the platform, PM me, I am going to offer early access to some of the first ones interested.

All replies read, thanks a lot. As expected, everyone has a different opinion about doing cash traders. I don't think it will be possible to convince the majority of people to trade with cash instead of another payment method but as a platform, we just want to offer the option to do it.

From what I see, the current setup we have for cash trades that allows traders to chat with other trades and decide the way they want to do the trade and be responsible for it, is the best way to do it. We'll start with that and add features as we go along.

The first goal for cash traders will be to get known in the bitcoin for cash communities and have at least 1 cash buyer and 1 cash seller in all major cities.


I have other posts I want to make regarding other aspects of our decentralized platform so stay tuned if you are interested. I'm also available by PM if anyone wants to discuss in private.
If anyone has anything else to say about cash trades and wants to voice their opinion, feel free. Else, I'll go on and close this post if there are no new replies in the next week.

Hey, sure. We will have a prototype very soon so if you want to try the exchange, PM me and I'll give you early access.


Cash trades are definitely not for everyone but I disagree about the anonymity part and the source of money. Regarding anonymity, done correctly, a cash trade only reveals your face and the bitcoin address you sent from TO another trader. Compare this to an online trade (like a bank transfer) where you use a platform (whatever it may be): in that case, the trade itself is usually recorded on the platform, the bank details are usually revealed and stored by most platforms and the bitcoin address it is sent from and sent to is also stored. Now, not only can the trader you are trading with trace you back with this info but also the platform. Even if the platform encrypts all of this info like we plan on doing, I'd still take the cash trade over the online trade if I want to stay private but that is just me and you might not see it this way. Regarding the source of money, it's not fair to assume that all cash traders are criminals. On top of the privacy it offers, it also is a way to trade without worries about getting blocked by an entity (like a bank) or reversed by the bitcoin buyer. For example, I don't know where you are from but doing bank transfers between peers for Bitcoin in North America is discouraged and your account can easily get frozen/locked if they know you are trading Bitcoin.

Noted your point about providing evidence to allow a dispute for cash trades but still staying firm on the fact we want the cash traders to be in control and stay responsible. For cash traders, we want our platform to be the one place to find other traders. We will constantly work on improving our system to be able to easily find trustworthy traders. We can offer tips to have the safest cash trade possible and offer some filtering of obvious scammers/spammers. We have to be careful though. The issue with doing too much monitoring is if we start controlling the trades too much, the platform becomes more centralized and we would not want that as actual users of the platform.

Oh and oops. Should I delete the 3 past posts and repost them as one?



If we do end up some day offering escrow for cash traders and allow them to open disputes, we will have to ask traders to keep all communications on the platform, agreed.


If we provide a suggested fee and the cash trader sends a lower fee (even though most wallets now make it very simple to know how much to send), he's just a bad/novice trader and if I was on the other side of the trade, I would probably just bump it and explain to him what he did wrong.

The congested network though is unfortunately impossible to fix/predict and does happen sometimes. It has happened to me but as long as the fee was high (+ I would bump it to the max when that would happen), I usually felt OK with leaving at 0 confirmation because I traded with the other person many times before. I will say though that hopefully cash traders will start with lower amounts and build a relationship till they trust the other person. I had built some relationships with people were the BTC would be sent before the meeting, after the meeting, it didn't matter because the trust was there and the network of traders that trusted me was big enough to incentivize me to stay honest and traders knew that.

Hello! Great to see your interest. I will address the new point your brought up.
The Legal Point (This is huge and a big reason of why we started this decentralized project):
I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to get into specific laws right now because every country has its rules but the main thing that needs to be said is that our platform is a decentralized marketplace that allows to post offers and connect/trade with other traders. For cash trades, no trades are currently done on the platform so it is pretty much the safest way to build a platform to provide this service almost anywhere in the world without anybody being able to shutdown the project.
I'll add this last point but I will address this in more detail once I make a post specifically for online trades. For online trades, we will use a Multi-Sig wallet and only act as moderators of the platform so that is also, I would say, the most hands off way to provide a safe trading environment and be able to provide the service almost anywhere in the world.
All in all, from a legal point of view, our platform will be able to operate everywhere but please feel free to disagree with me because to be honest, this subject is a very complicated one and involves a lot of blurry lines since the technology is relatively new.


Thank you!

Appreciate the time and the answers. Regarding the point of using a 2-2 escrow for cash trades. It's a really tough point because on one hand it helps facilitate the trade itself, it helps the platform by reducing fake trades/feedback and we could charge a trading fee so as a platform, there is an incentive. BUT personally and most cash traders I know will agree that they prefer dealing with it themselves outside of the platform whether it be for privacy reasons (want to avoid a third party involved) or security reasons (don't want to have their coins stuck in an escrow) which is why in many cases they are picking cash trades over a bank transfer for example. There is also a decent fix to the issue of locking coins and sticking around when the btc trade doesn't want to confirm. For this problem, we could add a simple interface that allows both traders to optionally lock the price on the platform according to the platform price to avoid argumentation and even provide the bitcoin amount + btc transaction fee they need to transfer at the agreed rate for the agreed cash amount.

All this not to say we aren't considering using escrow, we will stay open to different options, but for the time being, we want to keep it in the trader's hands.

Thank you and feel free to disagree.

First, thank you for taking the time, I appreciate it. Second, let me answer your points.


For cash trades, I don't think there is a point to force traders to keep the conversations on the platform. We offer the option if you want to chat on the platform but if traders want to talk outside, it's their call.


Correct, if we implement auto-delete, conversations would be deleted after trade is marked as completed by both traders.


We haven't found one fix that makes feedback impossible to fake without asking for more information from traders. If it becomes serious, to stay away from forcing people to pay a fee to trade for cash or post an offer for cash trades, we started working on an option for traders to "trust" other traders and have a personalized trust score for each trader depending on if he is in your trust list, or if someone in your trust list trusts him, or if someone in ... and give a score according to that. It would be separate from feedback and could be a nice way to create a network of trusted traders. Most traders can fairly easily filter out the honest people with a conversation so our plan right now is to roll it out without this trust list and see how traders behave.


Again, Thank you and feel free to disagree with anything I say

Hello all, working on a P2P Bitcoin Exchange that will allow traders to trade between themselves as privately as they want to. If you have a little time to spare, I have 3 questions to ask you.

From the start of the project, I've been constantly asking traders I know their opinion about different features implemented on the platform. Asking new people really helped guide the overall functionality, so as development keep progressing and as we go through different features, I'd like to ask members on this forum for their opinion. The focus right now is on Cash in Person trades so I'd appreciate for you to answer the following questions.

Questions
1. How do you decide if a cash trader is trustworthy ?
2. For you, what is the most secure way to do a cash in person trade ?
3. How do you currently find cash traders to trade with ? If you use a platform, write which one and one thing you would like to be done differently on this platform?


If you can answer these 3 questions with a reply on this post, that's already great and I am thankful for your time.
For the ones that want to learn a little more about the project and what we plan on doing with cash trades, feel free to read on.









The Use of Cash Trades
In my opinion, Bitcoin is meant to be decentralized and give the right to the individual user to control his finances and spend it how he wishes. As most of us are aware, this right is being threatened by many entities and its usually at the crucial point where fiat is being converted to Bitcoin or vice versa. Since these entities such as centralized exchanges, banks, custodian wallets and governments try to control the conversion by blocking certain BTC deposits or freezing bank accounts, we find it absolutely necessary to offer all possible means of exchange for bitcoin buyers and sellers. Now, there are many payment methods available to trade Bitcoin and we plan on offering them but cash is a great one to start with for 2 reasons. The first reason, a cash trade is pretty much an absolute trade similar to bitcoin in the sense that once you exchange hard cash for BTC, the other trader cannot reverse the transaction like he can for all online fiat trades. The second reason is that cash traders are currently too dispersed among different platforms which we think is because platform have been neglecting cash trades since they don't make any commission out of cash trades. We think that if people were offered an easy way to trade for cash, they would do it. As a new platform, this is an opportunity for us to solve a problem and at the same time grow our reputation. How will we do this? In the next section we discuss how we plan on offering the cash trade option.
Disclaimer : After reading the paragraph above, it seems like the perfect way to trade but, of course, it needs to be noted that there are risks involved with trading cash in person. The main point is that at least you are in control of the risk and not some other entity deciding the faith of your money.

How Cash Trades will Work on our Platform
Bitcoin to Cash trades are pretty straightforward, as long as the cash is real and the bitcoin is confirmed, the trade is set in stone. The main issue is finding honest traders and, as a regular cash trader, I know this struggle too well. Before, things were not as complicated as they are now. Some of you cash traders will remember how it used to be to trade for cash in person on LocalBitcoins before they removed the option (and sold their soul :O). You just looked up a city, opened an trade with someone that had a decent profile, exchanged a phone number and from there it went smooth 99% of the time. You usually added that person to your contacts and now you had a trustworthy cash trader who you could contact when you wanted to sell/buy again. Things have changed, but with a few modifications, we think we can bring back that effortless trading experience. To do this we don't need to reinvent the wheel, traders still need to be able to create offers, search offers, check other traders' profile, open a trade and discuss the meeting or take the conversation outside the platform. We don't want to provide escrow since we cannot verify the payment. Plain and simple, the goal of our platform will therefore be to act as a contact list of traders to chose from without holding any of the user's information. We think that with a feedback system and some time, the good traders will rise to the top of the list and it will be once again easy for people to buy or sell BTC with cash in person anywhere in the world.

How a typical trade will look like :
Let's say Trader A wants to Buy Bitcoin for Cash in Los Angeles
1. Search for offers in Los Angeles
2. When he finds an offer he likes, he opens a trade for the amount he wants to buy
3. Both traders have now access to the trade and can now discuss whatever they want using the chat system or share a Signal number, Wickr, Telegram...
At this point, the traders are responsible for the trade and have to do their due diligence and arrange their own meeting preferences.
4. After the trade is done, they can both mark the trade as complete and offer feedback to the other person. And that is it.

Current Main Features for Cash Trades:
- Simple interface to search through offers
- Chat System
- No KYC
- Feedback System

Ideas we are discussing about implementing:
- Pay to post an offer
- Option to lock rate on platform (sometimes cash traders don't agree on what price point to use so if everyone uses our platform's rate, it might improve their in person trading process.)
- Auto chat delete after X amount of time
- Optional PGP encryption when chatting

Current Concerns we haven't fixed fully:
- Fake feedback


That's it for now. If you have any opinions about the cash side or even the project itself, you can do so by replying to this post or if you want, you can message me privately to discuss more.