I would make jokes about this being an incredible display of necromancy, but the timing actually makes a lot of sense.
For years, even as early as 2011, many of us have been searching for a P2P exchange solution primarily because we're concerned that a day would come when we'd run out of options to buy bitcoins privately.
Now, especially with the coinbase and bitlicense news lately, the time is rapidly catching up to us. Localbitcoins is the only sure way for 'murikans to find 'unmarked coins' these days if you don't have an inside deal... And there have been stings recently against localbitcoin sellers.
So it's time to re-open the subject, this time out of more desperation than idealism.
I see lots of projects like Bitsquare that are trying to make a P2P
OTC Exchange, but never an attempt at a real-time exchange, that works like a P2P bitstamp. These OTC exchanges can certainly help ease the problem, but I don't really see them being any better than OpenBazaar or localbitcoins itself for the purpose of helping anyone get coins privately... And that's simply not good enough for most people.
Why have real-time P2P exchanges been given up? Because no one has invented yet an easily-obtainable, universal crypto-token that represents the USD or other nationalized Fiat on these exchanges. Or have they?
The fear was that such a financial instrument would be hunted down by the secret service like eGold and Liberty Reserve were, for 'counterfeiting USD.' I felt this was as valid fear and haven't looked into it in over a year.
However now we have Fiat-locked-value financial assets from Coinapult, BitReserve, and now Tether!
They may be chased down and destroyed by the SS too one day, but they're here now and perhaps the right coder might figure out a way to tokenize these assets and feed them into a real time exchange like the DEX proposal I made years ago.
If successful, that would allow people to sell properly-backed, trustless Fiat tokens, which would make the exchange flow as follows:
- Alice buys Crypto-USD tokens from anyone in places like OpenBazaar or LocalBitcoins. She can trust that someone will always buy them back for the same USD later. (Unless the backing company like Coinapult goes under.)
- Alice loads them into her P2P Exchange app, where they look and act exactly like USD in real-time exchanges with massive, global, borderless order books.
- Alice trades them to Bob for bitcoins for any cryptosecurity, in whatever quantity she wants.
- Bob 'cashes them out' back to real USD when he wants, at a place like OpenBazaar or Localbitcoins.
This appears totally do-able now with the financial products from Bitreserve, coinapult and Tether... And a lighthouse campaign could raise the funds to make such an exchange pretty easily, I'd think.
Now the question becomes: Is the process above too unwieldy for most people? Would fewer people want to put their trust in those three token-issuers than they do in the localbitcoins traders of today? In other words, is it simply too much to ask humans to trust crypto-fiat tokens to be as good as the real thing? (Especially since there is a little risk.)
