- Appreciate massively the privacy and are willing to go the extra mile to leave no trace.
But executing this trade is rather hard. Main problems and frictions:
- Finding reliable and convenient partners. Topics here:
- Trustworthy: finding someone who you know won't fuck you over, or someone unknown but under a context where you feel confident they won't fuck you over.
- Meetable: person must be easy to meet, both in terms of physically going places and also overlapping schedules.
- Matching trade conditions: you must find a partner who will deal the way you want. Ie:
- Onchain vs Lightning vs other protocols on the Bitcoin side
- Details on fiat cash (avoiding large denomination bills and avoiding junk coins mostly)
- Price and premium
- These trades sometimes tend to be unprofessional and excessively informal, causing pains and sourness. Common issues:
- Unclear terms around trading steps (Bitcoin first? Cash first? Same time? Onchain confirmation?)
- Lack of clarity around price (fixed price? market + premium? what is the reference for market?)
- Meeting and doing the transaction requires meeting physically. This is troublesome both in terms of arranging time and place, and actually going there.
Some of the existing P2P markets such as Bisq, Robosats, Peach, etc. offer cash by mail options as a payment option for the fiat side of the trade.
The amount of liquidity present for such type of trade is anecdotal. Nobody uses it because it's a pain in the ass.
Furthermore, all of those P2P exchanges have experiences that focus heavily on digital fiat <-> Bitcoin trades. The specific needs for cash driven trades have been neglected, and their rules and trade protocols are digital first, cash after.
Finally, they don't do a good work at tackling the trust component. They either resort to inadequate multisig bonds (Bisq) or rely on easily gameable reputation systems (Peach).
### Informal networks around meetups and communities
Informal networks are very hard to assess since no one has a good global vision on them.
Luckily, I've had the chance to witness and perform myself quite a few trades in the Barcelona community. My opinion is that, once there's a sufficient critical mass of a few hundred people gathered around a community, trade does happen regularly and with decent volume. I have no way to confirm this, but I would bet in the past 24 months, member of the Barcelona community might have traded at least 10,000€ per month.
Informal networks do a great job in the trust side. The time shared in meatspace together, long-term relationships and shared network of frens both creates a high price for being a bad peer (you will be finger pointed and expelled) and provides security and trust to members of the community.
Where the informal networks don't shine is in reducing the matchmaking friction. The lack of a formal orderbook means performing a trade requires the initiating peer get in touch with many others to try to assess his options until he finds or negotiates a proper trade with some peer. It's cumbersome.
Furthermore, trust is not leveraged to the max. There might be members of the community that do not know each other, yet are both reliable and have common contacts that would justify a social bond, thus they would be happy to trade. But, if the social graph doesn't promote them connecting, they will never trade.
- A: Yes. It makes the idea simple and executable. No fancy cryptography, not asking the user to be a sovereign shadowy super coder. Login, check the orderbook, send a message, leave a thumbs up.
- Q: Law enforcement will want to destroy this.
- A1: Nothing illegal happening besides not declaring income.
- There could be multiple levels of membership with different prices and features
- Providing free trials at the start probably makes sense to entice users and to let them come in and see what the whole thing is about before deciding if it's worth the money we ask for.
- The seca is a good hub for hardcore bitcoiners. It could be that the seca itself remains free, but interesting services can be built around the community.
- Reach all frens and contacts that could be interesting. Explain our plans, get them on board to join the seca and use it. Give them invites for their own frens.
- Run a meetup to present the seca in Barcelona. Have the instance ready by then. Align everything to make that day the date of launch. Provide invites to all meetup participants.
- After launch, post a lot of offers ourselves to give the market some depth.
- Shitpost and spam in Barcelona channels and communities, reminders to frens.
- cross fringers and pray the gods of social propagation
Outside of Barcelona? Hard stuff. Best option is to have straight contact with leadership of a community and earn their trust so that the same kind of playbook can be run with their support and blessing.
- Forcing users to specify their terms provides other peers clarity (no need to have back and forth to find out what the other peer is willing to do) + makes offers searchable, enabling interested traders to find the most suitable offer in the crowd
