I noticed what I think to be a huge problem, particularly in regards to use in China. I’m not talking about the ongoing TOR problems, I’m talking market price. The CNY market price being used by Bitsquare is currently about 220 USD under the actual price. At the time of this writing, it is about 7232 CNY. Over on localbitcoins the price is about 8800 CNY. The reason for the discrepancy is that the Chinese government recently put HUGE restrictions on Bitcoin and the major exchanges are going down the tubes. This has caused prices to plummet within the major exchanges as people try to get their money out. Don’t believe me? Do the math and convert the CNY to Dollars and you’ll see that the market wouldn’t sustain such an imbalance for long. Also be wary of which provider for market price you use, as about half are still using the major exchange prices. So long story short, no Chinese bitcoin users are going to be using bitsquare if the market price is tied to the clearly doomed exchanges. It needs to be adjusted to be closer to localbitcoins (which exploded in the Chinese market a few months ago when the restriction hit). As someone who lives and trades BTC in China, I can say this platform will not bring users from China until this is changed (notwithstanding the TOR issues but I think most Chinese bitcoin users know about VPNs)
As a decentralized exchange, there is no way to set the price for bitcoin. It is up to the traders and a free market. There might just not be many good offers right now.
We get the price feed from BitcoinAverage and can customize the way how the price gets calculated if we see problems.
As Tor is currently not working in China it is not a real issue but we will look into it when we get Tor working.
Also the market price is only relevant if the traders use %based price. Otherwise it is only for orientation, so you can setup an offer with fixed price and be off the market price.