Can anyone confirm this or not??
I saw the CEO during the Barcelona Blockchain Week. He confirmed it.
It is very sad.
An exchange which never touches customer funds (neither
BTC nor fiat) and therefore has no legal liability, as well as being global and uncensorable seems absolutely necessary to make Bitcoin more resilient.
The good news is that even if Coinffeine (the company) disappears, their software still works. It just needs users.
I urge anyone who can to get the code for v. 0.12.0 from github, compile it, run a couple of peers and try a few transactions.
https://github.com/Coinffeine/coinffeineI was working on similar software myself (p2p cryptocurrency exchange) and ended up having to shut down as well.
I think what it comes down to is this: consumers care about convenience and speed more than they care about security and decentralization. They will obviously care about security if the Bitcoin exchange gets hacked but that's really something that only becomes evident when it happens (and it's happening a lot less with properly run, venture-backed exchanges.) So really, if the only benefit p2p exchange software can offer to consumers is security (which can also be done by centralized exchanges - as mentioned), and that benefit is completely invisible: then from the consumer's perspective there is literally no reason to use p2p exchange software (Coinffeine had low fees but there will always be some fees when doing fiat exchange.)
In the end Coinffeine didn't fail because they had a bad team, a lack of funding, poor execution, or anything of the sort. They failed because people want things fast and easy, and security slows that down. That is: people don't want p2p exchanges (but love to say they do.) It turns out what people actually want is a properly run centralized exchange that isn't hacked every week (and there are plenty of those now.)
Last but not least: the final reason a p2p exchange won't work comes down to marketing. It's hard enough to get people buying coins and "exchange" sounds scary enough as it is. Some people have smartly called their exchange a "wallet" but that probably doesn't help much when exchange is what everyone searches for. Could lead to confusion, so lets just say there's enough education to have people search for exchange. What exactly is a p2p exchange? Sounds weird and scary. And why do I have to download it? But lets assume they do download it: an exchange requires volume to be an exchange. So exchanges that are already established and have the most volume are going to be far more useful than those that aren't. There is a network effect at play here: everyone tries to sell on the most established exchanges and a p2p exchange would need to someone win those customers to be competitive.
tl; dr, true p2p exchange is dead.
