I know bisq is very well designed to avoid scams and to carry out succesful and honest trades but I think that I am missing something out with security deposits and sellers receiving payments and not sending BTC.
Suppose I want to buy BTC for €500 lets say that is equivalent to 10BTC.
If there is a 50% security deposit from each trade peer (for example) this means I have to lock €250 in my bisq wallet and the seller must do the same.
This would let us both with 5BTC less or -250€. Now I will transfer the 500€ and if the seller receives the payment, lets say via SEPA, and decides to not send me the 10BTC in the best case the arbitration will resolve the dispute in my favor and send me the whole security deposit, this is 10BTC or €500.
But 5BTC (€250) of the deposit were already “mine”, I locked them, so this would leave me with a balance of +5BTC (-5BTC + 10BTC) losing €250 (equivalent to 10BTC) and would let the seller with my €500 and a BTC balance of -5BTC (his security deposit) since 5BTC is equivalent in this example to €250, the seller would have scammed me and get a profit of €250.
I am for sure missing something like maybe SEPA transactions can be charged back and I can ask my bank to undo the transaction or something but I have no banking system knowledge and I dont know if this is still profitable for scammers using other payment methods.
I would appreciate if someone could resolve this doubt.
Thank you for your atention!
This is a detail that most worried users miss, wonder if there would be a way to make it clearer… before I answer your question, can I ask where you got your knowledge from? Is there a webpage we could edit to make it better understandable?
In any case, the seller will have to “send” your 10BTC before you can even send the money, as the security deposit involves for the buyer to lock the deposit itself, and for the seller to lock both deposit and full trade amount.
So, if trade amount was 10BTC and deposit 5BTC, the seller would have to lock 15BTC, before you are able to see the payment details to send fiat.
In case the seller decided to play “smart” and not release the 10BTC to you (getting back their 5BTC deposit) the 10BTC would still remain locked in the multisig escrow address, so yes, they would get your 500€, but they wouldn’t get their 15BTC (10 trade + 5 deposit) back, not a very good deal.
Please let us know (in private, if necessary) if this user at reddit is the same as the OP @salsayogurt just to know if this was a coincidence or something else is happening.
I took the time to make a wide but (hopefully) simple explanation: https://www.reddit.com/r/bisq/comments/vdr5pq/comment/icpc7s7
Thank you, great explanation and now it is fully crear to me.
All the knowledge I got from bisq came from bisq wiki (which is very complete), but it was my mistake to not re-read the security deposit wiki page even though it would be nice to add this page to the main page in my opinion. I remember to have search on the main page to an answer to my question and did not find it there.
I suppose that even having read the info I forgot how it actually worked since I have only played the BTC buyer role and assumed that seller had to do the same as me when locking BTC.
Again thank you very much for your clear explanation!
Thank you for your answer.
I am not that reddit user, anyway I can’t see the original post, it says, deleted by reddit spam filters. Great explanation, very similar to @w000000t 's and as I said to him, I think it would be a nice idea to add the security deposit page to the main page so it is more easy to find this kind of info that I considere very relevant
Thank you!
