I am posting the basic idea here to generate discussion and gauge if there is enough interest in such a feature for it to be worthwhile to make an official dao proposal and work on an implementation. So if you want and/or would use this, please speak up, or likewise if against.
For background, please read:
Proposal: Add a new offer type that is “F2F without escrow”.
This is strictly for finding trading partners nearby. Neither the maker nor taker would be required to deposit any funds. Bisq would be used only for traders to find eachother and setup a meet, and not play any role in the exchange.
note: I’m sure if we put our heads together we can think of a better name than “F2F without escrow”. Suggestions?
Why: If private trading is going to survive in an increasingly surveilled world, traders need a way to find eachother and conduct trades without electronic trails. This used to be possible on localbitcoins. Now it is not. The existing F2F functionality in Bisq is cumbersome and (I believe) rarely used. This is sad because Bisq should be picking up all the disgruntled localbitcoins traders. Bisq already has a (small but growing) trading community and p2p infrastructure, so it is much easier to bootstrap this on top of Bisq than to start a new project. Also, this should greatly reduce Bisq’s liability and headaches if a trade goes bad.
How: This can be implemented as a new offer type, so it will not affect existing F2F functionality. It should function similar to existing F2F except that after an offer is accepted, both traders are able to communicate with eachother to arrange a meetup and then finally each party can mark the trade as successful or not.
Phases:
Phase 1: Test the waters. Make the simplest possible thing that can work. Basically as outlined above.
Phase 2: Build out UI. If Phase 1 proves popular, then we could improve on functionality by adding maps integration, search for offers by geographical distance, etc, etc.