Is it possible to test your exchange or see how it works?
Hey, sure. We will have a prototype very soon so if you want to try the exchange, PM me and I'll give you early access.
First, I never wanted to see anyone in personal and do cash trades because it is highly risky as well as we are loosing our anonymity while doing such trades. I have been asked by multiple people to trade with them personally on LBC platform but I just simply deny them with no further questions.
If someone is willing to trade with physical cash means the source of that money is in big question because if they are legit tax payer they can simply use their bank account for safe trading.
Cash trades are definitely not for everyone but I disagree about the anonymity part and the source of money. Regarding anonymity, done correctly, a cash trade only reveals your face and the bitcoin address you sent from TO another trader. Compare this to an online trade (like a bank transfer) where you use a platform (whatever it may be): in that case, the trade itself is usually recorded on the platform, the bank details are usually revealed and stored by most platforms and the bitcoin address it is sent from and sent to is also stored. Now, not only can the trader you are trading with trace you back with this info but also the platform. Even if the platform encrypts all of this info like we plan on doing, I'd still take the cash trade over the online trade if I want to stay private but that is just me and you might not see it this way. Regarding the source of money, it's not fair to assume that all cash traders are criminals. On top of the privacy it offers, it also is a way to trade without worries about getting blocked by an entity (like a bank) or reversed by the bitcoin buyer. For example, I don't know where you are from but doing bank transfers between peers for Bitcoin in North America is discouraged and your account can easily get frozen/locked if they know you are trading Bitcoin.
- Btw, thank you for your responses as well, and you might want to follow the following rule and combine your last three posts into one:
32. Posting multiple posts in a row (excluding bumps and reserved posts by the thread starter) is not allowed.
Noted your point about providing evidence to allow a dispute for cash trades but still staying firm on the fact we want the cash traders to be in control and stay responsible. For cash traders, we want our platform to be the one place to find other traders. We will constantly work on improving our system to be able to easily find trustworthy traders. We can offer tips to have the safest cash trade possible and offer some filtering of obvious scammers/spammers. We have to be careful though. The issue with doing too much monitoring is if we start controlling the trades too much, the platform becomes more centralized and we would not want that as actual users of the platform.
Oh and oops. Should I delete the 3 past posts and repost them as one?
For cash trades, I don't think there is a point to force traders to keep the conversations on the platform. We offer the option if you want to chat on the platform but if traders want to talk outside, it's their call.
It depends if you are going to be offering escrow or trying to verify trusted feedback or not. If you are going to do either of these things then you absolutely want all communication to stay on your platform so it can be reviewed in the case of a dispute.
If we do end up some day offering escrow for cash traders and allow them to open disputes, we will have to ask traders to keep all communications on the platform, agreed.
For this problem, we could add a simple interface that allows both traders to optionally lock the price on the platform according to the platform price to avoid argumentation and even provide the bitcoin amount + btc transaction fee they need to transfer at the agreed rate for the agreed cash amount.
That's a good idea, but there is still the issue of people sending with too low a fee despite the fee that you suggest, or sending with a high fee and still having to wait over an hour for a confirmation since blocks are not mined regularly. No one wants to make an anonymous cash trade and hang around with the other person for an hour. The only way to solve this is for the buyer to accept a zero confirmation transaction and take the risk of losing coins to a double spend, or to use an escrow.
If we provide a suggested fee and the cash trader sends a lower fee (even though most wallets now make it very simple to know how much to send), he's just a bad/novice trader and if I was on the other side of the trade, I would probably just bump it and explain to him what he did wrong.
The congested network though is unfortunately impossible to fix/predict and does happen sometimes. It has happened to me but as long as the fee was high (+ I would bump it to the max when that would happen), I usually felt OK with leaving at 0 confirmation because I traded with the other person many times before. I will say though that hopefully cash traders will start with lower amounts and build a relationship till they trust the other person. I had built some relationships with people were the BTC would be sent before the meeting, after the meeting, it didn't matter because the trust was there and the network of traders that trusted me was big enough to incentivize me to stay honest and traders knew that.