[ANNOUNCEMENT] Mycelium Local Trader is Now Available!

[Rassah]

http://youtu.be/2_h9ZZwhwBg

The latest major Mycelium feature, called Local Trader, is finally out of beta and available to everyone.

With Local Trader, the development team at Mycelium sought to answer a question often posed by those new to bitcoin: Now that I have a bitcoin wallet, how do I get some bitcoins?

Local Trader lets those who already have bitcoins to offer them for sale, and those who are looking to obtain bitcoins an easy to use interface to find those sellers in their area. This allows sellers  to support their local Bitcoin economy and earn a little in the process.

Local Trader at a glance:

• All trades are person-to-person with cash for BTC.
• The servers mediating the trades hold no bitcoins or fiat.
• Bitcoin sellers create geographically pinned sell orders where they sell at a chosen exchange rate +/- a percentage.
• Bitcoin buyers can search for sell offers geographically, look for the best deals, and start a trade session.
• All trades use in-app end-to-end encrypted chat between the buyer and seller. Not even the Local Trader servers can read the contents.
• Buyer and seller can negotiate price and meeting place.
• As with the Mycelium Bitcoin Wallet, the source code of the Local Trader feature is open for review. You can compile and roll your own.
• The seller does not need to put funds into escrow; they are spent directly from his Mycelium Wallet.
• The buyer does not have to wait for confirmations - our revolutionary transaction confidence graph provides additional feedback on whether the transaction will in fact go through.
• A small 0.2% fee per side of the deal goes to supporting the infrastructure that we provide.

Initially, the trader options will be limited to standing sell offers and instant buy offers. Meaning only those who wish to offer to sell bitcoins for local currency will be able to create standing offers for buyers to search through. Later on, Local Trader will also add standing buy offers, for those who wish to offer the option of converting bitcoins to other currencies as well.

To enhance privacy, Local Trader eschews the login and password authentication method, and instead uses your wallet's private key to register and authenticate with the server, using the well established bitcoin key message signing feature. Also, all communication between buyers and sellers, such as when and where to meet, is encrypted using the traders' respective private keys. This means that the Mycelium servers that manage trades only know the bitcoin addresses, pseudonyms, coarse location, and trade history of the people involved, in effect making the system almost as pseudonymous as Bitcoin itself from the company's point of view.

Finally, when the traders meet and exchange cash, Mycelium's other new feature, the transaction confidence graph (currently limited to Local Trader) goes into effect, displaying the probability that the transaction that sends coins to the buyer's wallet will get included in the next block. To achieve this, Mycelium servers track the transaction as it propagates through thousands of nodes, as well as check it for possible double-spends, transaction malleability, long chains of unconfirmed inputs, proper transaction fees, and other possible issues. With this, traders can exchange cash and be on their way, fairly confident that the transaction was legitimate, without having to wait 10 minutes for a confirmation.

With the recent issues involving centralized exchanges shutting down or running away with money, and governments forcefully shutting down methods of getting money into exchanges, Mycelium hopes that this new feature will let anyone be a walking ATM, making exchanging bitcoins for other currencies much easier, and allowing traders to earn a bit of money in the process.

You can download the most recent verson from Google Play store here, or directly from mycelium.com.

Fore more info and HOWTO refer to: http://www.mycelium.com/lt/help.html

TL;DR: This is the most decentralized exchange you can use today. Decentralize ALL the things.

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[Jared C]

This is pretty huge.

IMO, The barriers to getting bitcoin just came crumbling down. No more linking bank accounts to questionable websites. No more scanning your palm at the Government Tax Avoidance Catcher Machine. Just ye good olde cash transactions in person.

Step 1) Have an android phone
Step 2) Have cash

That's it.

Thanks devs! This rocks. I hope Mycelium soon becomes synonymous with bitcoin wallet in people's minds so they can get this local trader functionality instead of installing another, less functional wallet.

[alexrossi]

Thanks for that awesome feature, tried with some friends and worked flawless

But please, change the stars color under the trader name! Right now is quite difficult recognize how many stars has a seller  

[Jan]

My 6 days old local trader acc (no trades yet) has only 1 star ranking. Most of the traders with 0 trades have at least 2 stars. Is this just arbitrariness?

Your rating depends on multiple factors. One is the age of the account, but the number of succeeded and aborted trades play a big role. If you go to the "My Info" tab you can see how many succeeded/aborted trades you have.

[Jan]

Your rating depends on multiple factors. One is the age of the account, but the number of succeeded and aborted trades play a big role. If you go to the "My Info" tab you can see how many succeeded/aborted trades you have.

Yes, I did a few test trades to see how it works. I didn't know that aborting a trade gives a bad rating. So now I have to delete my acc, reinstall the app and create a new account.  

That or make some successful trades. When you abort a trade the app tells you it has an impact on your rating. You can only abort a trade if both parties have accepted the deal, the alternative is stopping a trade (when none or one has accepted), which has no impact.

[Jan]

Yes, I did a few test trades to see how it works. I didn't know that aborting a trade gives a bad rating. So now I have to delete my acc, reinstall the app and create a new account.  

That or make some successful trades. When you abort a trade the app tells you it has an impact on your rating. You can only abort a trade if both parties have accepted the deal, the alternative is stopping a trade (when none or one has accepted), which has no impact.

I see! I have 1 aborted trade and lost 1 ranking star. How can I close/delete my account?

If you go into the keys tab you can detach your account from the key it is associated with.
You can then create a new key/address and use that instead

[hivewallet]

Jan, is it possible for us to integrate this into Hive?

[Jan]

Jan, is it possible for us to integrate this into Hive?

Absolutely.

The API is not 100% final and not well documented (working on that), so there may be API breaking changes in the short term, but we do our best to be backwards compatible with all the deployed clients.

This java interface gives you an overview:
https://github.com/mycelium-com/wallet/blob/master/public/lt-api/src/main/java/com/mycelium/lt/api/LtApi.java

This is a client-side java implementation of the interface:
https://github.com/mycelium-com/wallet/blob/master/public/lt-api/src/main/java/com/mycelium/lt/api/LtApiClient.java

The gradle components you would need are:
bitlib: https://github.com/mycelium-com/wallet/tree/master/public/bitlib
lt-api: https://github.com/mycelium-com/wallet/tree/master/public/lt-api

...unless you prefer to jump directly to HTTP/JSON

I am planning on making a simple console based Java application that shows how to use the API (create account, authenticate, start a trade, send/receive encrypted chat messages).
Let me know if that has any interest.