Topic: [Review] Robosats Bitcoin Lightning on-/off-ramp (no KYC, P2P, Tor) - page 2. (Read 691 times)

As long as he doesn't mean 'use their () tech' as in 'use CoinJoin tech' (with a different coordinator and within Trezor Suite), hard pass from me, too.
But I can see other wallets spinning up own coordinators and / or switching to Samourai for now. Long-term something decentralized would be preferred, of course. If that can be added into Trezor Suite and other popular wallet applications, it might get a lot more traction.

Regarding this: I just dug up the JoinMarket ANN thread. It's not clear from the original post if it has a centralized coordinator or not.
Also funny that it mentions 'tainted coins' and that you get 'clean coins from exchanges' through JoinMarket..

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Stats are looking good to me!

Even if that's the case, and you can guarantee that Trezor are unable to collect any data from you, you are still exposing your hardware wallet addresses directly to a blockchain analysis company via Wasabi. That's a hard pass from me.

Ok, sure. Yes, it would work, in the same way that Wasabi "works", but it would be awful for your privacy.

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Was poking about Reddit and found these stats: https://www.reddit.com/r/robosats/comments/vp9jid/some_amazing_robosats_stats/

A few weeks out of date, but seems like they've made 1804 successful trades in 4 months, so around 15 a day. Not bad for the launch of a brand new service. Hopefully will continue to grow!

I see. I'm a bit out of the loop about Bisq, but I'll check it out.

I had linked to it already..

Complexity of current Bisq v1 is biggest obstacle for more popularity with people, that is why they are making this major changes.
From screenshots I saw next Bisq version 2 will have some big improvements, but Trezor wallet integration and using it as internal wallet is just my speculation.

Back to Robosats topic.
Cool video instructions posted by BTC Sessions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW_wzRz_BDI

I mean I'm not saying it's the best thing adding more and more trusted servers, but I don't now why it wouldn't work. It should work just as well as Wasabi 1.x or using Samourai directly.

Simplifications coming with Bisq 2.0 are one of the biggest obstacles?
Or will these simplifications make it harder to use with an external wallet? I'm not sure I'm following here.

I don't understand what's the issue of doing a trade on Bisq and selecting 'external wallet' instead of 'internal wallet' for [1] funding a trade and [2] receiving bought funds. I believe both is possible with external wallet as-is.

This means you can do everything with 'external wallet' and use addresses from your hardware wallet to do so.

Well I said there are some things I didn't like from this interview, but I see potential in the same time.
I don't have anything personal against Wasabi team, and it's always possible to use their technology without any censorship and blacklisting with new coordinator.
It's even possible to use their tech and add it in Trezor Suite, that is open source wallet and it has Tor switch, so I am not worried about privacy implications if you turn off sharing information.

It's not just a matter of one extra transactions but simplifications that is coming with Bisq 2.0, that is one of the biggest obstacle for more people using Bisq.
I would much rather use Trezor directly connected with Bisq than sending new transactions each time I want to make a trade.
If centralized exchanges are connecting hardware wallets (FTX+ledger) I don't see why decentralized exchanges wouldn't do the same thing.

I agree. Essentially the same approach which ChipMixer is now taking as well. If Robosats continues to grow, then you can guarantee that there will be malicious clone sites popping up before long. If everyone knows from the outset that you cannot use the clearnet link to trade, then it is less likely that a new user will type "robosats" in to a clearnet search engine and lose their coins on a scam.

I'm not sure how that would work. For Samourai coinjoin, without running your own server then you lose your privacy to the Samourai servers. If you then put Trezor servers on top of that, that's another entity which can see what you are doing.

That should be no problem; in the video walkthrough the guy actually buys an Amazon giftcard from a different country's Amazon page. That does indeed work.
Account freezes because of stolen gift cards sounds like a pretty rare risk. In the worst case you can always open a new account, right?

o_e_l_e_o just clarified that clearnet mirrors are basically only for demonstration purposes, in my opinion a great choice by Robosats. A compromised clearnet mirror could still deanonymize you as a (potential) user of Bitcoin / Lightning / Robosats and fake mirrors could pop up that don't have this limitation, though. Hence just stick to the GitHub page's onion link.

There's nothing to find a solution for; it works already. I mean, you can literally fund a trade offer 'from external wallet' (and use e.g. your Trezor), as well as receiving the security deposit back directly to the hardware wallet. If you're buying, I believe you can also receive to external wallet, as well. Otherwise, it's just 1 on-chain transaction away; not a big deal either to be honest.

Damn; especially since they could just do What Sparrow does and use the (so far) better coordinator by Samourai.

Thanks for the link. You had me excited about coinjoins being integrated with Trezor devices, but it turns out they are planning to do it all in conjunction with Wasabi, and we all know how terrible that is. A real shame. Unless of course Trezor are planning to spin up their own coordinator and not spy on their users?

The stuff about peer to peer trading is interesting. Cool that Trezor are investigating ways to provide it, but I also have lots of question about the privacy implications since in all likelihood it will take place via the Trezor Suite software and so therefore Trezor would be able to link all your trades to all your holdings, which isn't great.

I guess we'll have to wait and see, but my excitement is far less than it was a few hours ago.

I would only consider this as a fallback option, in case some big attack happens on Tor again.
Yes most people use free VPN that is usually nothing more than government agencies spying or cheap proxy servers without any privacy.

I am trying to find it, but I set my browser to auto-erase all my history when I shut it down, so it's lost now and I can't find it searching anywhere.
There are some parts of this interview I didn't like, but I guess you will have to trust my words until I find and post original link.
There is even a part were Pavel is speaking about Bitcointalk forum and how it all started

EDIT:
I found it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV_cKk_N0Wg

PS
I know Bitcoin Takeover is sponsored by Wasabi so you can skip those parts if you want, but he is a cool bitcoiner guy.

Sure, but it's impossible for Robosats to enforce only allowing clearnet access with a VPN, and plenty of people use bad VPNs or do stupid things with their VPN and then leak a bunch of data. Safer to not allow it at all given how easy it is to use Tor.

Yes please. Do you have link so I could listen as well? Quite a change of direction from implementing (and then removing) AOPP a few months ago.

No idea.

Problem with gift cards is that you can use them only in specific shops and they are not available worldwide in same cases.
I remember one case from bitcointalk when customer got his account frozen because there was suspicion that his gift cards were stolen.

You can always a good vpn with clearnet, maybe Mullvad or something similar.
I am not saying it's perfect solution, and yes this is also centralized and goes through 5/9/14 eys countries, but I think it's still better than using it just with clearnet.

I just listened one interview with Trezor main developer Pavel Rusnak (who also worked on some Linux OS btw) and he said that Trezor is thinking of finding solutions to work with Bisq, and using Coinjoins directly from Trezor Suite.
Combination of Bisq and Trezor working together would be amazing, and I am sure it would increase liquidity.
They are also thinking of some other ways to create non-kyc bitcoin purchase on-ramp in EU, and that is not an easy task.

Oh very nice, but is anyone actually using Robosats with I2P or not?

They are a step ahead of you there
https://learn.robosats.com/docs/access/#-privately-with-i2p

This is roughly the number I see every time I have checked in the last few months, although right now there are 20 open offers across both books. But if we see from the above graph that they are doing up to 0.5 BTC a day, and most trades seem be in the region of ~$100, then that would work out to about 100 trades a day at present. And the ticker at the bottom of the site says 200+ active users in the last 24 hours.

If you connect via clearnet, you get the following warning banner at the top of the screen:

So you can use clearnet to view orders, but not to actually trade.

I'm not sure if there's a (moving) average anywhere to check out or maybe a graph over time, but right now there are only 7 open sell offers and 5 buy offers.
It appears that some banks nowadays have internal money transfer options, like Revolut and N26 which I see often on Robosats. Probably faster and safer (when it comes to irreversibility) than SEPA bank transfers.
By the way; money transfers not being immutable is a very real risk; essentially people would scam each other on P2P exchanges by reversing SEPA transactions. Gift cards are pretty good when it comes to this, as far as I know - one of the reason online scammers actually like gift cards as payment method.

I guess they could be used as fallback, but I wouldn't recommend that. In case of a decentralized system where peers connect P2P, it would be less of an issue. But since it's centralized, if you connect through clearnet, they could easily store your IP (or be forced to do it) and hand it to authorities.

So far Bisq seems to have much more liquidity than Robosats and in both cases I've never really experienced lack of liquidity as an issue.
Too many different projects could decrease liquidity in each of them individually, but since it focuses on a little bit of a different niche (Lightning, no decentralization, but higher convenience), I believe Robosats is a welcome addition to our 'pool of options' when it comes to on- and off-ramps.

Are there enough orders already created by other people, maybe with some order book, and what payment options is most popular in Robosats?
It's nice that custom payment methods could be added, maybe face-to-face, or some payment methods for specific countries.

Yeah I know, I was just speaking related with recent problems that affected other wallets and services with Tor support.
Good thing is that Robosats at least has some fallback option, and maybe I2P or some other alternative could also be used.

Bisq is generally better option but like you said it has it's negative sides, and it doesn't have much liquidity and offers in some countries and regions.
I heard they are preparing big updates for new 2.0 version, and we could see one Bisq forked exchange coming out in future.
It doesn't hurt to have Robosats in the mix, we need more options to improve Bitcoin privacy.

Well, the gift cards are priced in fiat; so I'm not sure if they're fiat or not..

Good question. As a Bitcoin seller, you can apparently get a few % above market on Robosats, but to get it through quicker I created a new order at 0% above market. I do believe that similarly to Bisq, the usage is higher than what the order book suggests and that prices seem so high (for Bitcoin buyers) since cheaper offers are simply bought up quickly. Need more experience with it to say for sure, though.

You can accept / request pretty much any payment method you want. You just select a currency and the payment method within that currency. The list is extremely long and you also have a 'free text field' option.


In the left picture, I'm just typing out 'BitcoinTalkCoin' after having selected a few recommended payment methods. In the right picture, that's what it looks like after it's selected. As long as you can find a buyer in the specified trading period, you can choose any payment method you want. When someone accepts your offer, you get a chat window where you agree on one of the payment methods that had been specified and wait for the payment.


I think that Robosats will be the least of our worries if Tor gets seriously attacked. A ton of Bitcoin nodes would also stop working, as well as the whole of Bisq and the WikiLeaks upload page.

Of course; using something like this through clearnet immediately cuts its effectiveness dramatically. Especially with regards to the aspect of being safe in case of a hostile takeover of the platform and / or future data requests by authorities (- remember it's a centralized service as opposed to Bisq where there's no central database with data to extort).

Indeed!

Are they offering only gift cards or there are other payment methods available?
It's nice to see that Robosats exchange works with Tor browser, but I am not sure what happens if attacks on Tor network continue in future.
On their github page I see there is clearnet domains but they are marked as unsafe and they are not recommended.

I am going through their learn page, and those stats look very good with increasing volume in last few months:


https://learn.robosats.com/

Thanks for the write up. I still haven't got around to trying it out myself yet.

I wasn't aware that gift cards were an option though, I thought it was fiat only. I guess I only ever looked at the order book and saw fiat methods, but I see now if you try to create an order you can specify gift cards (or indeed any payment method whatsoever, including Monero).

When you did your trade, did you accept an open order or did you create one yourself? I'm just wondering if you created an order and someone filled it in under an hour, which would suggest it is being used more than the quite sparse order book would suggest.

This page explains how the bonds, escrow, and disputes work.

Robosats review

A few days ago, I've tried Robosats for the first time. Here are my first impressions and thoughts about this service.
[Disclaimer: obviously unpaid, unsponsored]

It calls itself a 'simple and private LN P2P exchange'; though it's important that this is not a crypto-to-crypto, but a Bitcoin-to-fiat exchange; hence why I call it an 'on-/off-ramp', instead.


Here's their own short description from GitHub:

They do have clear-net mirrors, but it's always recommended to just take the .onion URL from their GitHub readme and paste it into a Tor-enabled browser (or simply Tor Browser).
I don't think I should explain how it works, because it would be just a copy from their README or video walkthroughs; I'll just leave some impressions and opinions.

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I did a small trade, selling some BTC for a gift card and it went through in under an hour. The whole process is honestly smoother and quicker than my otherwise favourite on-/off-ramp, Bisq.
Especially for newcomers, I believe it's a great way to get started. By paying sellers with gift cards, they could acquire the first small amounts of sats necessary do open larger Bisq trades, for examples, which do need a certain amount of owned funds as security deposit; until now always a big issues to on-ramp people without requiring them to get that amount from a CEX in the first place.

What it is:

• It is peer-to-peer.
  
• It is pretty cheap and quick.
  
• It is suited for onboarding users.
  
• It is anonymous (Tor, no KYC, no account, Lightning).
  
• It should be trustless like Bisq, through the use of HODL invoices, instead of Bitcoin SCRIPT smart contracts.

What it is not:

• It is not decentralized.
  

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What I continue to recommend Bisq for:

• Larger sums that you want to receive on-chain or are hard to route on LN.
• Experienced users that already know how to mix coins after buying them.

What I consider using Robosats in the future for:

• Need to exchange more quickly than what I can do on Bisq.
• Need smaller amounts of fiat / Bitcoin.
• Want to sell / buy Lightning funds anyway (so I can skip swapping on-chain funds to off-chain or vice versa).

I can see how for many users it can be a big benefit that you don't have to install an application and keep it running for sometimes a few days; however for me it's not a factor. Just want to give this point a 'honorable mention'.

Also do keep in mind again, this is a centralized service. It could be censored, shut down, or there could be issues with the escrows. In Bisq, if I'm not mistaken, escrow only kicks in if there's a dispute, otherwise it's all done through Bitcoin smart contracts and multisig transactions through the client software. I am not 100% sure about how escrow / support works on Robosats; maybe someone can help me figure this out 100%.

I'd be glad to hear your experiences with this on-/off-ramp!