With the concerted efforts going on to cut off Bitcoin from banks over the last few weeks, we focused our latest blog post on how you can buy and sell Bitcoin peer-to-peer - no banks required 🤝
Join the P2P revolution today:
https://foundationdevices.com/2023/03/bitcoin-doesnt-need-banks/
Shoutout to @#[0], AgoraDesk, HodlHodl, @#[1], and Bisq for the amazing tools they've built.
Favorite post I've written in a long time, especially if it onboards more Bitcoiner's to P2P exchanges and pulls them away from centralized, KYC exchanges.
Dive in and let me know your thoughts on the blog post below 👇
What do you see for the future of P2P exchanges and what needs to be improved with current approaches?
#[0]
Amazing write up! We have a great deal of fun building RoboSats. There's a lot to improve in the p2p space, but things are evolving fast.
On RoboSats we are solely focusing now on making it easy as f*** for anyone to host a coordinator, as well as, enable clients (e.g. Android app) to talk to many coordinators at once so order book liquidity does not fragment.
#[0]
I think Robosats is killing it at the moment. P2P over lightning is so quick and easy and the process is intuitive.
You can host it yourself on for example Start9, but the process still centralised. Not sure how you get round that as someone needs to be the third party for resolving disputes. Maybe having multiple implementations of Robosats to have more than one centralised party would go some way towards it. But it needs more liquidity for that.
Liquidity is key, all services need more people using them instead of centralised exchanges as this will give a better experience for everyone.
💯
One of the motivations for the post is to drive more liquidity to these amazing options, and help to create a snowball effect.
As for centralization - while the drive for decentralization is great, it's *not* necessary for everything. As long as the platform doesn't custody funds or enforce KYC it's not too important. Mainly just need at least one decentralized option (i.e. Bisq) as a just-in-case for if governments go after these centralized P2P exchanges.
I guess operating a P2P platform like Robosats is similar to operating a coinjoin one in terms of government coming after the central party.
Maybe in the future it will be possible to spin up alternative Robosats similar to the way Whirlpool are planning with coordinators.
It's FOSS, so as far as I know it could definitely be done.
Usually there is no legal grounds for shutdown due to Robosats not actually ever holding funds.
Would take a huge legal shift for these type of exchanges to come under legal pressure, thankfully!
GitHub censorship is always a potential hurdle, but Robosats has hopefully reached escape velocity and could continue via GitLab or a new NOSTR-based alternative.
