I see, very interesting insight thanks! When you say technological decentralization, does it mean there were no servers (similar to Bisq) and you had to run a client to keep your offers online?
Because if the software is open-source and the architecture is really decentralized, people could surely keep the network running, no matter if the creator (or anyone else) wishes so or not - right?
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.
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.
Will the project continue to exist in its current form should all these people suddenly disappear? Maybe, maybe not.
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.
Good point - what springs to mind for me was winning the
'Discovery of the Year 2021' award where I also got some funds from Sportsbet! I might actually not be able to sell them on a centralized exchange.
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.
I did get it directly from their payout address..
I'm not sure if I understand correctly, but it appears Yobit charges 0.0005 for any coin.
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.
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.
I'm not sure how decentralized they are though, if they have a simple website that you can interact with. This to me implies there are (centralized) servers that can easily be taken down or hacked.
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.
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.