Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Please simplify the concept of P2P exchange
by
nwbitcoin
on 22/05/2013, 14:51:08 UTC
Maybe a few other sites (each site is of course centralised but as a whole you have many points of failure) which offer "trading tokens" or something in exchange for real money.

A token purchased at one of these sites should be fully redeemable at any other site, so if any of them decide to shut up shop at any point there are more you can use.

Then you deposit this token at the P2P exchange and it acts like fiat to buy/sell btc with.

How would you secure this, make sure the tokens are valid, can't just be made up, sold/used twice, do money laundering checks etc etc? Hell if I know, but this is the sort of thing I'd like to see. Separate fiat from the BTC exchange, make it someone elses problem.

But then the "trading tokens" are just like another form of bitcoin, right?. I still don't understand how this is possible unless it interacts with the banking system, which is obviously a major problem. I think BTC ATMs are the closest we can get to this. Put physical cash in a machine to get BTC, get physical cash out in exchange for BTC. The decentralized aspect would have to come from the market not being dominated by any big players which also seems unlikely in the long run. But as long as the fees are low, who cares?

The trading tokens will be valued based on a fiat currency, so 1 token would be the same as a .0001 of a $.  Its only role is to create a digital version of fiat so that you can trade for bitcoins. With there being millions of these tokens in existence, there would be no market in growing their value, however, it would mean that bitcoin exchanges would no longer be an international financial transaction, just somewhere to exchange files.

maybe! Wink