Low liquidity exchanges or p2p

[jago25_98]

 What would be required in order to have an exchange that holds no balance of it's own, or vastly minimizes the balance it holds?

- so you send your fiat or BTC and it gets converted as soon as it arrives for example
- or you pledge an trade, script something to autosend from a balance on your own computer but can still back out if you wish to cancel the process
- or simply automated payout to a preapproved or locked address/account

 Problems I can foresee include:
- slow fiat system transfers
- slow bitcoin system transfer (confirmations)

 But it could be a good setup for people who want the cash on the exchange for as little as possible.

 I still think exchanges are an accident waiting to happen or of course, have happened. Any funds you have involved with an exchange is as bad as a bank.. maybe even worse - completely against bitcoin. Any dealing with an exchange is against bitcoin. Q: How many BTCs are held at exchanges? It could be argued that this is not Bitcoin.

[casascius]

Look at some of my recent posts including an offer where I've offered to pay for BTC blindly sent to me (and successfully done so).

I touch on my thoughts as to how developments and extensions to that idea could serve as a distributed exchange that could work for more than just me, if a good cryptography-based escrow scheme were involved.  Meanwhile I'm putting effort into introducing one.  In short, I believe an exchange that doesn't touch money - or perhaps something better described as an orderbook and escrow service - could do exactly what you have in mind.