Topic: 3 Questions directed towards Cash Traders (2 min of your time for a P2P Project) (Read 255 times)

All replies read, thanks a lot. As expected, everyone has a different opinion about doing cash traders. I don't think it will be possible to convince the majority of people to trade with cash instead of another payment method but as a platform, we just want to offer the option to do it.

From what I see, the current setup we have for cash trades that allows traders to chat with other trades and decide the way they want to do the trade and be responsible for it, is the best way to do it. We'll start with that and add features as we go along.

The first goal for cash traders will be to get known in the bitcoin for cash communities and have at least 1 cash buyer and 1 cash seller in all major cities.


I have other posts I want to make regarding other aspects of our decentralized platform so stay tuned if you are interested. I'm also available by PM if anyone wants to discuss in private.
If anyone has anything else to say about cash trades and wants to voice their opinion, feel free. Else, I'll go on and close this post if there are no new replies in the next week.

There is a third, which is to meet at a bank. Either the buyer of bitcoin can withdraw money directly from the bank, thereby bypassing the ATM limit and ensuring genuine notes, although this does compromise privacy somewhat since the seller will need to come inside the bank to ensure the buyer doesn't switch out the notes for fakes. Or more easily, meet at the seller's bank and have the seller immediately deposit the cash to their account to verify it is genuine before releasing the bitcoin.

There were logical answers on first and third questions and I share their opinion (despite the fact that I am not a cash trader) but I found the second question very interesting:

As o_e_l_e_o mentioned, public areas with a lot of people are preferred and also places where there are cameras to capture if theft or unwanted thing happens. You have to come with a friend(s) to be ready for unwanted situations and better to choose physically strong friends with preferable some decent skills in a fight (but it depends on the amount of money, it's not necessary for some $$$).
 
There are also two ways to be sure that cash is real:
1. Ask him to withdraw via ATM
2. Ask him to exchange money from A currency to B currency and take the converted money (and then reconvert if you wish), this way you receive money from the local exchange and can feel secure.

You can trade peer to peer using various online fiat accounts, in which all the other person sees is a name. Unless you have a very unique name and are very careless with splashing it all over the internet alongside your other personal details, a name alone is not enough to identify you. If that is too much, then you can trade in cash. Wearing a full face mask and hat or a ski mask is now socially acceptable thanks to the pandemic, and so makes it easy to hide your face and identity.

If you are meeting in person, then do it somewhere public with security cameras, such as a large shopping mall or transport hub. Take a friend with you.

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. At best, I can pay the fees for a single transaction to trade peer to peer. At best using a centralized exchange, I have to pay the fees for a deposit transaction, pay the trading fee, and pay the withdrawal fee.

You must decide whether you want to create a central trading system or just a site that gives you people who can trade in exchange for cash with disclaimer if those people are scammers.

 1. If the system is centralized, money can be placed in the escrow, and after both parties agree to release the guarantee, the money can be sent.
 2. Meet in a public place.
 3. There are a lot of sites but the difference in databases is the site that has a larger database that will get more people.


I suggest that the mechanism for releasing escrow is a video call. When the deal is done, the site releases the guarantee.

It maybe okay for someone who trade in hundreds but what if we are going to trade in thousands of dollars too often, we are risking our identity to someone so they know how much money we are making in such time intervals.

You are also at rick of getting kidnaped for such reasons.

You are going to spend more money to do such trades than trading on online platforms and the list goes on...

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.


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.

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?



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.


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.

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.

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.

For the most part, you're right but I think it might come in handy when one of the involved parties turns out to be a dodgy person "in person" and attempts to cover his/her tracks ^{[if conversations stay in your platform, it'll be harder]} and this way, users could probably report ^{[with enough evidence]} such traders for account suspension of some sort ^{[I know you're probably not a fan of such system but it's needed when it comes to disputes]}.

- 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:

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A small note to those that mentioned account status ^{[e.g. feedback, number of trades and etc...]} as a trustworthy measurement, it's not always best to rely on it since such accounts are being sold in here and other forums/platforms ^{[even though it's against the TOS]} from time to time ^{[unfortunately]}.

Hello! Great to see your interest. I will address the new point your brought up.
The Legal Point (This is huge and a big reason of why we started this decentralized project):
I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to get into specific laws right now because every country has its rules but the main thing that needs to be said is that our platform is a decentralized marketplace that allows to post offers and connect/trade with other traders. For cash trades, no trades are currently done on the platform so it is pretty much the safest way to build a platform to provide this service almost anywhere in the world without anybody being able to shutdown the project.
I'll add this last point but I will address this in more detail once I make a post specifically for online trades. For online trades, we will use a Multi-Sig wallet and only act as moderators of the platform so that is also, I would say, the most hands off way to provide a safe trading environment and be able to provide the service almost anywhere in the world.
All in all, from a legal point of view, our platform will be able to operate everywhere but please feel free to disagree with me because to be honest, this subject is a very complicated one and involves a lot of blurry lines since the technology is relatively new.


Thank you!

Appreciate the time and the answers. Regarding the point of using a 2-2 escrow for cash trades. It's a really tough point because on one hand it helps facilitate the trade itself, it helps the platform by reducing fake trades/feedback and we could charge a trading fee so as a platform, there is an incentive. BUT personally and most cash traders I know will agree that they prefer dealing with it themselves outside of the platform whether it be for privacy reasons (want to avoid a third party involved) or security reasons (don't want to have their coins stuck in an escrow) which is why in many cases they are picking cash trades over a bank transfer for example. There is also a decent fix to the issue of locking coins and sticking around when the btc trade doesn't want to confirm. 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.

All this not to say we aren't considering using escrow, we will stay open to different options, but for the time being, we want to keep it in the trader's hands.

Thank you and feel free to disagree.

First, thank you for taking the time, I appreciate it. Second, let me answer your points.


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.


Correct, if we implement auto-delete, conversations would be deleted after trade is marked as completed by both traders.


We haven't found one fix that makes feedback impossible to fake without asking for more information from traders. If it becomes serious, to stay away from forcing people to pay a fee to trade for cash or post an offer for cash trades, we started working on an option for traders to "trust" other traders and have a personalized trust score for each trader depending on if he is in your trust list, or if someone in your trust list trusts him, or if someone in ... and give a score according to that. It would be separate from feedback and could be a nice way to create a network of trusted traders. Most traders can fairly easily filter out the honest people with a conversation so our plan right now is to roll it out without this trust list and see how traders behave.


Again, Thank you and feel free to disagree with anything I say

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.

I can never be certain that trader is really trustworthy but I can reduce the risk if I see his number of trades and feedback I received from other people who worked with him before, of by looking at his profile with reviews.


Best thing for me would be to go in some public place with lot of people and probably during the day, we meet on coffee shop or drink some beers and avoiding dark street corners.
Alternative way would be if we all use some trusted third person as escrow.
 

Several options are used and that is localcryptos.com website or Bisq exchange, but none of them is perfect and there can be problems with no offers and low volume sometimes.
There are also local ads and meetings with people we traded previously.

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Is it possible to test your exchange or see how it works?

I disagree, which is probably why I like Bisq so much. There have been plenty of exchanges, coins, tokens, etc.,  where we have known the names of the people behind them and they have gone on to scam anyway. Knowing a name doesn't prevent anything. Further, I don't want to have to trust the developer - I want to be able to verify the app for myself. Make the app open source, let the community examine it and verify it does what is claimed, and trust is no longer necessary.

It also goes against the whole ethos of anonymous cash trading to demand the developer to sacrifice their own privacy so you can protect yours.

Hi,
Just yesterday I was commenting something on this topic (my local board), let me opt for a general opinion before the three specific questions.

I do not know where you are in the world but if you name Los Angeles I suspect that you are in the United States, in any case it does not matter but the appreciations with cash vary a lot, someone's need to have cash in the United States varies a lot with someone in any other part of the world, in fact even the sports seasons, I remember that in the soccer world cup in Russia, in a popular square exchanges were made, contact in LBTC, there were also cafes, pubs, where you could do the exchange, in these public places only word of mouth works, that is, the simple question to anyone "bitcoin for cash" will take you to those sites, dangerous? of course, but tourists are a bit careless, not alls but it happens.

The other issue is legal where the exchange is made, this point is the most complex, even more that the project.

Suppose that will be a global App (!) so at that time  "be your own bank" ...it makes sense,  when you do a face-to-face p2p exchange regardless of whether it is sale or purchase, you understand the power that bitcoin has even more when the exchange currency is from the country you visit, and there we enter "international waters" it is not about avoiding responsibilities, on the contrary, that is why I bring it in context, in reality your three questions they are not the real priority in the solution or an obstacle to the implementation of the project, in fact they develop by themselves in their environment, there is a standard that works there, some change "colors" and the "small letters" but it's the same in the long run.

That said, it is to have the Uber (keeping the distances) of the Apps for cash exchanges with bitcoin, the KYc is elementary and necessary for some users according to some countries, there will be other users that they won't have to but they will have to work for their reputation.


Safety! the second most important substantive question after the legal issue or the first, well when the guys from UBEr (excuse the example again) created their app they did it for "service" but in other countries the UBEr is successful because of "security" .

Something so complex to manage remotely for an app to impose order (security) is with simply ratings, I do not care about the comments as long as their percentage is 100% "Trust" in a relevant number of transactions at least 100-500, 99% no longer It serves me I look for the one that has 100%. This is a money matter it has to be perfect.

this appears in traditional apps as a simple and normal data, when it should be in red, have sound and make your phone blink (figurative sense ... but it should be something like that)

On the other hand, it is not important for the bitcoin niche, but a project like this has to have a first and last name, by its very nature if I am going to use your app tell me who you are, in a trade of this type, two faces will be seen , we must begin to trust the owner of the app.

I would recommend that you do a market study in areas where parallel markets fluctuate in various currencies, for example the border of Mexico and Canada, if you are in the United States, outside there South America is a good market niche, Asia too.

In general, other countries or let's say better than other people would select traditional ways such as going to an exchange, bank, cash. You have to think that in essence this is your main competitor.

Anyway, I'd rather see an app-based "ATH walker" than a traditional ATM.

The programming for any app of this type is already done, it is necessary to change its soul, create the first secure, reliable p2p social exchange network with bitcoin.

...someone with bitcoin at Starbucks to have a coffee ... for example.

Hopefully you consolidate your project the way you want it, the main thing is that you succeed.

Age of account on platform, number of trades performed on platform, feedback rating on platform. Plus the general feel I get from chatting with them.

Somewhere neutral and public with plenty of other people around. Perhaps somewhere with security cameras for extra safety. A large shopping mall or large transport hub (airport, train/tram/metro hub, etc.) for example. Take a friend and don't carry more valuables than is necessary. In terms of preventing counterfeit bills, I might ask the other person to withdraw the money from an ATM at the time of the trade. There are obviously ATM limits, but if I'm trading large amounts then I'm not picking someone I've never traded with before - I'm instead picking someone I know and trust from previous trades.

Bisq. More traders and volume!

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Then I'm probably not going to use your platform over Bisq. The trustless 2-of-2 escrow it uses is a benefit over no escrow at all, particularly for face to face trades, and also deals with the issue of either having to hang around with the other party waiting for a confirmation, or leaving with zero confirmations and the potential to have the transaction double spent.

There isn't a way to completely trust a total stranger when it comes to such trades but usually, the way they respond to certain questions indicates what kind of buyer/seller they are.

A crowded place with a friend or two ^{[preferably someone that's tougher than you]} and nearby shops to verify you're not dealing with counterfeit money ^{[just pick a few at random and ask them to verify it]}.

I no longer do ^{[I haven't done it for the past two years or so]} but I used a local forum back then ^{[I prefer to not disclose it]}.

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It's always better to keep conversations in a single place as opposed to moving them out of the platform ^{[scammers would love such things]}.

Hopefully, conversations aren't deleted unless trades/deals are already finished between involved parties.

What have you done so far to combat this issue?

Hello all, working on a P2P Bitcoin Exchange that will allow traders to trade between themselves as privately as they want to. If you have a little time to spare, I have 3 questions to ask you.

From the start of the project, I've been constantly asking traders I know their opinion about different features implemented on the platform. Asking new people really helped guide the overall functionality, so as development keep progressing and as we go through different features, I'd like to ask members on this forum for their opinion. The focus right now is on Cash in Person trades so I'd appreciate for you to answer the following questions.

Questions
1. How do you decide if a cash trader is trustworthy ?
2. For you, what is the most secure way to do a cash in person trade ?
3. How do you currently find cash traders to trade with ? If you use a platform, write which one and one thing you would like to be done differently on this platform?


If you can answer these 3 questions with a reply on this post, that's already great and I am thankful for your time.
For the ones that want to learn a little more about the project and what we plan on doing with cash trades, feel free to read on.









The Use of Cash Trades
In my opinion, Bitcoin is meant to be decentralized and give the right to the individual user to control his finances and spend it how he wishes. As most of us are aware, this right is being threatened by many entities and its usually at the crucial point where fiat is being converted to Bitcoin or vice versa. Since these entities such as centralized exchanges, banks, custodian wallets and governments try to control the conversion by blocking certain BTC deposits or freezing bank accounts, we find it absolutely necessary to offer all possible means of exchange for bitcoin buyers and sellers. Now, there are many payment methods available to trade Bitcoin and we plan on offering them but cash is a great one to start with for 2 reasons. The first reason, a cash trade is pretty much an absolute trade similar to bitcoin in the sense that once you exchange hard cash for BTC, the other trader cannot reverse the transaction like he can for all online fiat trades. The second reason is that cash traders are currently too dispersed among different platforms which we think is because platform have been neglecting cash trades since they don't make any commission out of cash trades. We think that if people were offered an easy way to trade for cash, they would do it. As a new platform, this is an opportunity for us to solve a problem and at the same time grow our reputation. How will we do this? In the next section we discuss how we plan on offering the cash trade option.
Disclaimer : After reading the paragraph above, it seems like the perfect way to trade but, of course, it needs to be noted that there are risks involved with trading cash in person. The main point is that at least you are in control of the risk and not some other entity deciding the faith of your money.

How Cash Trades will Work on our Platform
Bitcoin to Cash trades are pretty straightforward, as long as the cash is real and the bitcoin is confirmed, the trade is set in stone. The main issue is finding honest traders and, as a regular cash trader, I know this struggle too well. Before, things were not as complicated as they are now. Some of you cash traders will remember how it used to be to trade for cash in person on LocalBitcoins before they removed the option (and sold their soul :O). You just looked up a city, opened an trade with someone that had a decent profile, exchanged a phone number and from there it went smooth 99% of the time. You usually added that person to your contacts and now you had a trustworthy cash trader who you could contact when you wanted to sell/buy again. Things have changed, but with a few modifications, we think we can bring back that effortless trading experience. To do this we don't need to reinvent the wheel, traders still need to be able to create offers, search offers, check other traders' profile, open a trade and discuss the meeting or take the conversation outside the platform. We don't want to provide escrow since we cannot verify the payment. Plain and simple, the goal of our platform will therefore be to act as a contact list of traders to chose from without holding any of the user's information. We think that with a feedback system and some time, the good traders will rise to the top of the list and it will be once again easy for people to buy or sell BTC with cash in person anywhere in the world.

How a typical trade will look like :
Let's say Trader A wants to Buy Bitcoin for Cash in Los Angeles
1. Search for offers in Los Angeles
2. When he finds an offer he likes, he opens a trade for the amount he wants to buy
3. Both traders have now access to the trade and can now discuss whatever they want using the chat system or share a Signal number, Wickr, Telegram...
At this point, the traders are responsible for the trade and have to do their due diligence and arrange their own meeting preferences.
4. After the trade is done, they can both mark the trade as complete and offer feedback to the other person. And that is it.

Current Main Features for Cash Trades:
- Simple interface to search through offers
- Chat System
- No KYC
- Feedback System

Ideas we are discussing about implementing:
- Pay to post an offer
- Option to lock rate on platform (sometimes cash traders don't agree on what price point to use so if everyone uses our platform's rate, it might improve their in person trading process.)
- Auto chat delete after X amount of time
- Optional PGP encryption when chatting

Current Concerns we haven't fixed fully:
- Fake feedback


That's it for now. If you have any opinions about the cash side or even the project itself, you can do so by replying to this post or if you want, you can message me privately to discuss more.