Quote from: JordanLee on September 27, 2015, 08:02:09 PM

Quote from: mably on September 26, 2015, 04:14:25 PM

It would be interesting to have a comparison with other decentralized exchanges like Coinffeine.

Based on some brief research, Coinffeine is a desktop application focusing on facilitating fiat and Bitcoin exchange. The fiat must be offered by an irreversible payment processor, specifically OKPay at this time. Prior to commencement of a trade, both parties must submit a deposit. Their website says if one party does not complete their part of the trade, they lose their deposit. This raises the question of who is holding the deposit and who decides whether a deposit is forfeited. I don't see a way to have that occur without a trusted authority. Perhaps someone who understands Coinffeine better can explain that to us.

Their project is over a year and half old and I couldn't find a way to download their software, though I did see a report that it has been deployed in 70 countries as a technical preview in July.

To compare with B&C Exchange, we only facilitate trading of blockchain assets while Coinffeine is designed to facilitate Bitcoin to fiat transfer. B&C Exchange doesn't require any funds other than those being traded and small amount of BlockCredits as fees, while Coinffeine requires an additional deposit. B&C Exchange will use a number of multisig signers dynamically voted for by shareholders to hold funds, while I am unaware of how Coinffiene deposits are held. B&C gets revenue from BlockCredits burned as transaction fees in every transaction. I saw an article claim "Coinffeine is not currently charging fees, but the CEO noted that OKPay would charge a 0.5% commission for bitcoin purchases". I don't know how they will charge fees in a decentralised manner in the future. B&C Exchange will offer trading access via an open source web app that uses no database other than the blockchain that can be hosted by anyone and likely an Android app, while Coinffeine will employ a thick client.

I'm certainly no expert on Coinffeine, so if I missed something or if someone can explain how their deposits work and how they will receive revenue, please enlighten us.

Hi Jordan,

It looks like they removed their download page very recently as I have been able to download it a few days ago.

I was able to make a successful bitcoin sell order and was paid almost immediately on my OKPay account.

It looks like Coinffeine doesn't hold anything as everthing seems to be done directly between peers.

At the moment it looks like orders and peer IP addresses can be matched. That's probably the reason they decided to remove the download page until this security flaw is fixed.

I think the Coinffeine micropayment channel could be something interesting to plug into B&C for fiat payments.