A bot is going to do what? Someone else's random transaction takes place thru my main account?
No. Other people's transactions will not be taking place through your account. Trader A is selling 1 Bitcoin at $4. Trader B want to buy them. Trader A accepts Dwolla. Trader B sends money from his Dwolla account to Trader A's Dwolla account. It's that simple. Your password will be encrypted and stored on your PC so that the bot can have access to your account so that the trading process can be automated. It will also show your Dwolla balance inside the program. The only thing that will be asked of you is to verify that you really want to buy those Bitcoins so you don't buy them by accident. Same goes for the person that puts the Bitcoins up for sale. They will be asked if they are sure they want to sell the amount of Bitcoins at the price they specified. Then the bots, working together with the Bitcoin blockchain (which is what we're currently working with for recording orders, etc.) handle the rest so that the trading process will be completely automated and indeed be completed in less than 30 seconds.
You propose some interesting ideas which will require some time to think about.
All Best,
Michael
Unfortunately, we have a trust problem. In the fiat world, exchanges require brokers to disallow trading unless traders are verified to posses the items they can place orders on. It also removes control of said funds until the order is filled or killed.
What if trader A does not actually have any bitcoins. What happens once the cash comes to his account? What if he has some bitcoins but puts in an order on two such p2p exchanges? How do you propose to remove them out of his control? This would need the multi-signature escrow and could introduce delays. Also, how do we know trader B has funds in dwolla and will not immediately remove them after order is entered into the system?
Ideally, we shouldnt be using dwolla, which is tied to a bank account that can be monitored or frozen or anything else.
Any p2px needs to mathematically proven to be fool-proof. If there is a lot of money at stake, somebody will exploit it and confidence in the solution will collapse. One way around this is to ensure a lot of money is never at stake. Every transaction is packetized into small, random sized transaction of $5 or less (or around the value of 1BTC). That way the incentive to exploit a flaw is reduced since the network can quickly flag a rogue account at minimal damage.
We need something like paypal where we can fund using a visa gift card and is not tied to any bank account. Paypal may work for now but ideally, we need the community to run about hundreds of these paypal type services and have thousands of miners offer a micro escrow of each transaction. Hey, I pay 0.01BTC per transaction in a centralized exchange, so I'd gladly pay miners. Miners should be happy to offer micro-escrows since 0.01BTC accumulates pretty fast.