Is haveno safe to use or not?
Some of the things people have been saying about haveno elsewhere are
You tell the software. Haveno has no way to actually verify a payment has been made but people are incentivized to act honestly.
What stops an arbitrator from colluding or masquerading as one of the parties and then signing the transaction twice in their favour and scamming people?
nothing stops this. This is the issue with having centralised arbitrators, this is currently the haveno-reto team. Which is an anonymous centralised organisation. Not exactly conducive to building trust really is it? I’m not saying they will scam you, I’m saying it’s possible from a technical standpoint. To those that will say “setup your own network then, it’s open source”, this isn’t an issue of who runs the network, but the underlying system of centralised arbitration.
if I’m trading with an anonymous individual, they could well be the arbitrators as well. With all things taken into consideration this is no more secure than trading with a reputable exchange.