This is either a request for advice about how best to use AnonChange, or a feature request.
Use case, probably useful to some other privacy coin holders: I need to receive BTC—but I literally don’t have a Bitcoin wallet right now. Why can’t I find a shell/TUI Bitcoin light-wallet with
compact block filters for privacy? I use only shell/TUI wallets for Zcash and Monero, and their light-wallet/remote-node protocols don’t make me give anyone a list of my addresses.
Perhaps I may need to write my own wallet; I’ve been intending to make a new forum thread about this. But it’s too much effort when anyway,
I’d immediately do a no-KYC exchange of BTC to money—with “money” by definition being fungible. And anyway,
meanwhile, I need to receive BTC!
Is there any way that I could arrange a reusable floating-exchange BTC deposit address, get a PGP-signed guarantee letter for its terms, and give the BTC address to others? I would use a separate withdrawal address, for my own records; my XMR (or in the future
when you add it, ZEC) wallet will tell me at what address I received coins. To watch the BTC address, I don’t need a wallet: It would take me less than ten minutes to make
a shell script with
curl and
jq, to poll
the Esplora API on
Blockstream’s onion. Then, I just need a bit more casual hackery to glue all this information together with CoinGecko API rates, to make sure every exchange is at a reasonable rate.
If your own internal policy forbids
address reuse to protect your own assets from blockchain analysis, I would understand that. I only ask the question in this form, because other people expect me to give them a reusable address.
Even a single-use address may be useful, if it doesn’t have the usual time limit for deposit.
Either way, such that you don’t take time-unlimited obligations, I don’t mind if an address has
some time limit—as long as the expiration is reasonable for this purpose (say, 90 days minimum) with a precisely stated expiry time in the PGP-signed guarantee. I also don’t mind if there are low liquidity limits, as this is only for relatively small amounts—maybe up to a few hundred $ value at a time, at the maximum. I’m happy as long as each exchange is within a few % of CoinGecko at the time it is made.
That assists privacy coin usage in one direction—but what about the other?
The following is
not a feature I’d expect you to add quickly; I merely float the idea, as a potential medium-term goal for a growing exchange.
I am looking for something that works like the old
xmr.to. IIRC (someone please correct me if I’m mistaken), it was run by a non-anonymous company in Singapore; they ran the service for a few years, then shut it down, I guess maybe due to local regulatory environment changes. I gather that they were XMR community members, running the service with modest fees partly to promote XMR usage.
The service did exactly one thing:
Fixed-rate other coin → BTC swap, optimized for use with time-limited BTC shopping chart checkout invoices. This made it immediately useful to hold the other coin, and spend it anywhere that BTC is accepted. It was so good, it got me holding some XMR, even though I prefer ZEC; I also did some technical brainstorming for how a “zec.to” service should work, though my sketches then are all now obsolete.
This is useful to any altcoin holder, but it’s especially important for privacy coins.
It’s necessary to hold a privacy coin long-term, not to make the newbie mistake of BTC → (altcoin) → BTC with similar amounts in a short time. I’ve lost
much more money than I’ve ever gained on privacy coins held for privacy, not for financial speculation. But how important is privacy?
For the exchange, it is difficult to provide this service without opening yourself to attacks; from the outside, I infer that the xmr.to people had a detailed knowledge of the Monero network. For the user, it is difficult to find an accountless exchange that
reliably sends funds within the BTC invoice’s time limit: If you have a BTC invoice with a 10–15 minute expiration, then by the time you set up an exchange, enter the info into your wallet, and send the deposit, there is only a 5–10 minute window for the exchange to send money.
What a challenge. If you are at all interested in investigating this as a
potential medium-term goal, I think it would give you a competitive advantage with the market of altcoin holders who need to spend BTC (and nowadays, stablecoins that also have wide acceptance). I’d be willing to discuss privately some ideas for how to optimize such a service.
Regarding the withdrawal fee, no worries! If we receive a little more or less than the expected amount, AnonChange automatically updates the exchange to match the amount actually received. So you don't have to worry about sending a bit less than the amount you entered.
The user needs to be cautious about this. Fixed-rate exchange is often used to pay a third-party invoice, which requires an exact amount.
Does anyone know why it's not possible to write reviews on Monerica? Was it disabled by a moderator or service rep.?
I saw an announcement from them stating that they would ban any reviews if they discovered that a project was running a paid review campaign. Honestly, that’s not a bad policy, and I suspect that’s the reason behind it.
When only small compensation is given, I think the important thing is ethical disclosure that the review is compensated. What is really needed is to avoid fake praise by social media influencers taking huge kickbacks under the table. I see that AnonChange’s review program offers only $20, to do something that costs money; it seems closer to Amazon Vine than paid shilling.
I’ve been reluctant to do a test exchange to myself—necessarily a roundtrip exchange with some extra legs, as I don’t have an immediate need to exchange money. I’d need to throw away exchange fees plus network fees in both directions, while taking market risk on a small amount. Perhaps I may do one soon, for AnonChange’s paid review program; the amount I come out ahead would be so small, it would be “below minimum wage” for the my time and effort writing the review! But at least, I would not pay money out of pocket.
(General disclosure: I am compensated to advertise AnonChange in my signature.)
