Topic: Newbies: Don't use centralized exchanges! (Read 1219 times)

We've seen them do their thing against Monero and other privacy coins and, likely, they'd also crack down on these decentralized exchanges.

They don't give a treat on these services and platforms that give more privacy and protection to ourselves but, they see them as a threat.

But as a community, we can do our own thing as well. If they can't patronize these type of exchange that are protecting us, we can.

It is very possible to happen because the biggest risk for governments to attack these decentralized exchanges is their founders, developers are very popular and known publicly.

Governments, if they want to force Decentralized exchanges to change policies on KYC, will have to create pressure on founders of these DEX. If founders don't obey to request from governments, they will be arrested, charged with life sentence and more. Under such terrible pressure, founders will have no better choice rather than to obey the new strict regulation and cooperate with governments.

Why KYC is extremely dangerous – and useless

We can enjoy KYC free on some platforms that will be less popular with time.

What is worrying someday that the regulators and governments will be forcing the people that develops these decentralized exchanges for whichever purpose they are with, data, txids, etc. Yeah, they're decentralized but there's a probable way for the law enforcement to track them and do what just they've been doing to those projects, cryptos that are into privacy.

I am afraid that it is not impossible to happen. But as long as we're able to enjoy these platforms that promotes decentralization, we're good but just to give some thoughts about that day and it will come.

And going on with the centralized exchanges, before, they'd question you and ask more details about you depositing and withdrawing 10-100 Bitcoins. Now, they might even question you more about 0.1 and even lesser while the price of Bitcoin is going up even if you've already passed on their kyc just for that sake.

I knew of trade-in-person method but it is risky. You can use this method because it won't touch your bank account and does not need to use bank transfer, it's good for your privacy without connection to bank but as anything else, it has weaknesses.

One of weaknesses and risk to consider with this method, is your safety physically. When you go to trade in person with your trade partner, be careful with faked cash changed hands and physical attacks too.

Known physical Bitcoin attacks
All known physical attacks on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (2014 - 2022)

I agree that using decentralized methods to sell crypto for fiat is way to go. Meeting up with someone locally or using platform like Bisq provides secure and private way to trade. It is good option that Bisq allows for anonymous transactions without need for KYC reducing risk of funds being frozen.. Additionally avoiding centralized exchanges saves on fees and minimizes risk of technical issues. However it is good to ensure that you are complying with local laws and regulations when engaging in peer to peer crypto transactions.

I agree with you that binance is a good exchange many traders are using to trade their coins, and it's very safe and secure to make their transactions successful at the end. If binance is banned in your country, you can make use of some exchanges app that is very good like binance, but don't save your coins in exchange app because many people have loss their coins on exchange app, because is not good for people to store coins for long years before they can trade to make profits.

I guess Bybit exchange will give you the security binance use to give to their users, because they function the say way in the exchange market like binance but different team, but Bybit exchange is not too popular like binance.

Nigerian transaction added: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/newbies-make-una-no-dey-use-exchanges-wey-be-centralized-5505196

Thank you, Chilwell. 

I didn't say "blocking" is robbery. I just said that they're essentially dictating of where your money is allowed to go, hereby they censor you. And since censorship is an objectively bad habit, especially when self-custody is an option, you should avoid using Binance. You might want to continue buying bitcoin using Binance, for personal reasons, but using it as a wallet is just plain stupid.

Binance exchange blocking some countries of it's platform is not robbery, and this doesn't mean the exchange isn't safe for newbies, Binance will warn you to withdraw you funds before they ban those locations, I like this exchange and I have been a user for the past year's now.. No other exchange is better.

Added German translation: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/anfanger-und-neueinsteiger-vermeidet-die-zentralen-regulierten-borsen-5411848

Yes I'm sure about Poloniex, that use to be one of the best move from a Cex in the recent years, but Poloniex has finally dropped mandatory KYC for registering and using its platform. It happened in late 2019 just before Christmas.
I've never given any KYC to them and I can still freely access my account.
https://medium.com/poloniex/a-new-account-tier-is-here-bebb4a8919e0
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/12/23/poloniex-drops-kyc-for-withdrawals-below-10000-following-us-exit/

Few restrictions remain, but they are very light for the average Joe.
https://support.poloniex.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041078913-Level-1-Account-Features

• Poloniex: Are you sure about them? I did not use Poloniex since late of 2017 or early of 2018. Around that period, they required KYC. I submitted my document and successfully verified my account. I did not use it long enough but did they actually lift KYC requirement in latest years?
• Yobit: that exchange is shady, not like a scam because shady # scam. Even they don't require KYC, I don't use them
• Hotbit, Bitfinex: No KYC (you are right)

Almost 90% of all coins that are present on the market can be bought only on a decentralized exchange, as this does not require the financial costs associated with listing on CEX. Accordingly, by the time of TGE, each team is listing its coin on DEX. Such an example is the Robby coin, which is traded only on Uniswap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/robby/markets/

Oh, that's how it's decentralized, that's neat! Yup, sounds good to me. Too bad Ethereum has so many flaws, but I like the idea of using a smart contract; that doesn't require to spin up a whole new network like in Bisq.
There's one issue with smart contracts which is that the immutability of the blockchain doesn't easily allow you to update them to fix a bug. You could code an update mechanism into it, but then it's hard to trust the immutability and you have to hope that devs won't change the contract in a 'bad way', making it less decentralized again. But I digress!

Cool cool. I mean if you're already in the Ethereum ecosystem, might as well use smart contracts. I just wouldn't build a Bitcoin on-/off-ramp as an ETH SC.

Etherdelta was probably one of the first exchanges I used. It's basically a smart contract, hence the decentralization aspect.
The website is just a way to interact with the smart contract. Even if the website is down or completely cease to exist it would still be possible to interact with the smart contract via other tools such as etherscan or mew.

Back then, it was possible to trade any token (erc20) just by importing its smart contract address.
Forkdelta as the name suggests is a fork of etherdelta.

If you want to sell crypto for fiat, I'd always recommend going decentralized.
You can either find someone directly who wants to get some Bitcoin locally and meet up; or you can use a truly decentralized exchange like Bisq. It's basically just a way to securely find and trade with an unknown person directly. I'm sure that this is legal wherever you are located; that's usually a trade of goods. Like, the same way you can sell a bike on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace; you can sell Bitcoins. Just not through Craigslist or FB Marketplace, but through https://bisq.network/.

It's much better than using a centralized exchange, since as I wrote above, it's cheaper, anonymous, you don't need to do KYC and you're not at risk of getting funds frozen, confiscated or the exchange having technical downtimes.

Actually this is what I want to do. But the fact that I need to cash out crypto to money should be done by the CEX in my country that is regulated under the government institution. That is CEX. all my local exchange is regulated and they ask our KYC. May be if this is for cashing out, no choice beside doing it on CEX. Although there are P2P, but is it really secured?
However, if this is about exchanges that are for trading, it may not only be CEX, but DEX is also suitable for me. But so far, I use mostly Binance.

Yes, correct; that's how Bisq works. I was wondering whether the platforms you've used in the past also worked like this or how they were technologically decentralized.

The 'social decentralization' is a good point. I guess here Bisq tends more towards Bitcoin; as its founders or lead developers don't appear publicly as 'prominently' as Buterin does, and last I checked they do have a lot of community contributions. In theory, it's easy to fork Bisq (e.g. reverting to an older version) and continue using that version, in case they 'mess up' and move into a direction that the community doesn't like. Same as Bitcoin really; even easier since there's no blockchain split and whatnot.

I did get it directly from their payout address..

It's even more extreme if you work out the 'percentage above market' like in my $100 example. It means even if you take a very expensive offer on Bisq for 5% 'above market', you'll still be saving money.

Ohhh, connecting a wallet doesn't sound too good. At least create one just for the decentralized exchange, maybe. That's kind of what Bisq does; it has an integrated (local, non-custodial) wallet, that stores its private keys on the PC it's running on. You can use external wallet, too, though. In any way, the keys don't leave your device.
I still don't understand how the 'ETH DEX' platforms you guys are talking about were decentralized, if there was no client software like Bisq running on the users' personal computers.

Yeah, that's right. You were one of the winners who got some money from Sportsbet. If you were to deposit those in Gemini or Binance.US (probably Coinbase as well), they would surely have some questions for you. Especially if you got those coins directly from an address associated with Sportsbet. I see no reason why Sportsbet would make any roundabouts and hide the origin of the Bitcoin.   

Seems that way, yes. So that's around $11 at current rates. But there are also reports like this one where the screenshot shows they are asking for 0.03 ETH for Ethereum withdrawals. Even after this recent drop in value, that's still $35.   

Yeah, 0.0007 BTC seems to be correct according to https://withdrawalfees.com/exchanges/hitbtc as well.

You connect your own ETH wallet to the exchange. The exchange doesn't provide you with a deposit address. The danger is that one of the ways to do that is to import your private keys! That of course shouldn't be done. A different way is connecting with a Ledger hardware wallet. With the Nano, you don't import any private keys of course. I remember reading about a DNS hack a few years ago where everyone who used the fake site at the time had their wallets emptied, but Ledger users remained protected because of their connections through hardware wallets.

Honestly, I have little knowledge about how the Bisq network works, but as far as I'm concerned, there is no central server that makes Bisq exchange operate. In fact, in order to access trading offers, users first need to install a Bisq node, which will communicate with other nodes in a peer-to-peer network. In a peer-to-peer network, each node is both a server and a client, each node keeps all necessary information and hands over it to peers it has a connection with. Bisq is decentralized for two reasons: it has no central point of failure, and it is built on top of another decentralized network, namely the bitcoin network. It is a perfect example of decentralization on a technical level. Is it also decentralized on a social level? I don't know. It is open-source software to which everyone can contribute, but still, it has founders and lead developers. Will the project continue to exist in its current form should all these people suddenly disappear? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how much influence all these people have: if the level of influence is such that it allows them to make (useful) changes to the protocol, then this network is not that decentralized on a social level. Bitcoin wasn't decentralized on a social level in its early days because Satoshi had too much decision-making power. But take Ethereum, for example, it uses proof-of-work, peer-to-peer topology, and "immutable" smart contracts - the signs of technical decentralization - but it still has a founder who is able to make arbitrary changes to improve his "decentralized" blockchain. Another example of weak social decentralization is premine, which allows founders to control networks even more.