Had my first trade and i am excited

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Since getting in to crypto i got more and more paranoid about how states might crackdown on crypto networks and users. Every hint about bitcoin or crypto in my bankaccount makes me uneasy. I regret now to have sent my passport to various exchanges when i couldn’t yet see the possible impact crypto might have on the world.

I had my first trade completed on bisq today and i can’t tell you how exited i am about it. it was a small amount but this small trade truly felt like freedom. No hint regarding crypto, no big corporation as sender on my bankaccount.

in this whole greedy ICO fork craze that is going on in the cryptospace currently, this project is a fresh breeze. A fresh breeze of cryptoanarchy.

big respect for the work your doing and especially in the way your doing it.

thank you!

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Great to hear your feedback! Thanks!

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Exactly my thoughts after using Bisq for the first time :smile:
Bisq is the best thing in crypto since Bitcoin :smiley:
Great to have you in the network / community and spread the word!

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My orders are up :wink: and i am spreading the word but to be honest IRL people still need to be convinced that bitcoin is more than a quick way to make more fiat. And the anarchist people i know who might understand the need for it are hippies who are more excited about growing their own food than trading digital assets P2P :smile:

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Well, while this might be a bit OT, the 2 things that I often tell people who have never heard of Crypto are:

  1. It’s “A bit like PayPal”, where you just get money into a digital “Account” and spend it from there, with low fees and very fast (at least faster than any bank transfer), also your bank will never know how much you received and spent through BTC (like when using PayPal)
  2. BTC is neither a company nor a bank. This means as long as you have your keys, you basically have cash in your hands. Instead, when using either PayPal or any bank, your money is not in your hand, but they have it and give you the promise that you might get it back. So they could freeze your account or maybe do an “exit scam” (like some exchanges) and run away with your (and everyone else’s) money (this has happened with banks in Greece).

Imho these are pretty good starting points to understand what crypto is about and which problems it solves. Also, most people really like these ideas and then get a little bit of BTC (using Bisq :wink: ).

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I also know many people who have other priorities than “trading digital assets” and understand them well.

Bitcoin has for many of those the bad smell of money and speculation. But they usually don’t see/know the underlying significance, neither they know what money really is about - the glue which lets people economically interact across their local boundaries.

Here are some highly recommended articles regarding that:

In my opinion Bitcoin is to money what the Internet was to information.

Bitcoin will transform what money is and how we interact with it. That will go much further than the primitive and narrow Fiat money as we know now.

Compare the current money with the classical forms of information communication and production before the Internet. We had:

  • TV
  • Radio
  • Newspaper
  • Postal mail service
  • Telephone
  • Books

Now compare which new forms the information communication and production has been created by the technological revolution of the Internet:

  • Email
  • Webpages
  • Instant messaging
  • IRC
  • Blogs
  • Social media
  • Github
    -…

And the most important: If anything is missing anyone can build it without asking for permission or requiring a privileged position.

The big difference between the old and new model is that it levels the playing field for everybody. You can start your blog and influence others in a way which was not possible before the Internet. Collective production and exchange of information is not anymore a privilege of the elites controlling centralized entities with high entry costs like TV, radio or newspapers. Anyone has the global stage if they have anything to say.

Bitcoin will do the same with money as the Internet has done on the information domain.
DAOs and other new forms for creating new permission-less forms of money and/or economic structures will change the word more profoundly than any political revolution has ever done before.
Same as past technological milestones like the invention of the printing press has changed the world more profoundly than any political revolution.

With such a view I think organic farmers and hippies can also understand that Bitcoin is not about making quick profit by trading stupid ICO tokens but its about changing the world by redefining the basic structures our culture is based on. By making those structures more “emancipated” (in German “gleichberechtigt”) and accessible to everyone it will open up a gate of innovation and creativity.

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this gave me goosebumps :smile:

It is also something i tell my hippie friends that with the DAO there comes the possibility to scale their vision and connect their community also with other communities in ways that have never been possible before. Instead of hoping that every person in the world gets ideologically enlighted enough to be involved in organic farming themself the focus shifts to creating tools and experiment with systems that encourage participitation.

I truly believe in the future big corporations and even states might be replaced by DAOs and it feels like a logical upgrade to democracy. Instead of voting on given issues we will be able to download and participate in our prefered system and if there is none that fits we can create our own and invite others to “vote” for it by participating. To future generations this will feel self evident and democracy might appear like feudalism to us today today.
When i was like 14 years old i couldn’t understand why it shouldn’t be possible for people to have different passports with different rulesets in the same country. Later dismissed as a naive youganddumb idea but when i encountered the idea of the DAO it immediately struck home.

I am really looking forward to Bisq’s DAO and i love your meritocratic approach of valuing participation higher than stake and deciding not to do an ICO. But also if you would make an ICO this would be the first that would excite me enough to participate since ethereum.

I like the information/internet = bitcoin/money comparison but at the same time this makes me cautious. Because judging by the sentiment in the web today it seems that it wasn’t as emancipating as i hoped it would be. The increased amount of information didn’t encourage people to think for, and trust themselves more instead it seems that identity politics and groupthink is back more than ever fueled by on outrage targeted clickbait and fake news.
only a reason more to dismantle the state as fast as possible :smile:

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I like to tell people to imagine that there was a time not that long ago where you stashed your savings under the mattress with only you having control over it. With bitcoin you can have the convenience and security of the bank account and still be in control over it.

still most people don’t care. They don’t even care that their savings are getting less over time. Money is for most just a bad thing you have to deal with. They fail to recognise that it is their generated “energy” (labor, ideas etc.) that they are storing and money is the medium they are storing it in. If you value your energy you better think about the battery you’re using for storage :wink:

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I think we have to be patient until the slow human mindset changes according to the new paradigms. I guess the printing press also did no immediately develop its full potential and the Internet is just about 25 years old, for most people even just 10 year or less. We will see some hick-ups and failure paths like we might see currently with all the abuse of social media (but that just shows the weaknesses of how social media platforms are designed)…

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yeah you’re probably right that it takes more time for us to adapt to the transformation that is happening with the Internet.

Let me derail this thread further and put on my tinfoilhat for a moment: What if entities like the nsa, google, facebook are figuring out with the help of AI how to inject and distribute memes through the web. This could lead to an invisible form of crowd control where decentralisation might not even matter anymore. And how could we protect ourselves from that or even know that it isn’t already happening?

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You mean sock puppets with memes?
That is happening for sure a lot already on social media. I get all the time offers from social media marketing companies for such.
I think to distinguish between a real human and an fake user/sock puppet/AI bot will become more difficult over time but people will develop their senses to succeed in that. Not all of course, it will be a talent like it is a talent to distinguish real art from commercially produced entertainment or real friends from others who only want to suck.
I think identities will be mapped more to the areas where the person is active rather than to a real life identity. So one will have several separated identities with different reputation and history and controls how and where to expose those.
Tools to help us to distinguish and validate identities will become the Google of tomorrow.
I think we need to focus that the control will be kept at the edges and not at centralized data silos like we have today. DAOs might help here a lot as they can fix the broken economic model we inherited from the 90s when too much money was flowing into the Internet companies that they did not had a need to develop real business models. Later as people got used to the all is “free as a beer” model the abusive business model with selling user data become one of the very few alternatives to fix that economic bug. Advertising of course is part of that and not much better.
Hope with the inflow of money to ICOs atm we do not repeat history here…

But to come back to your concern: I don’t belief in the wisdom of the crowd or democracy. I think meritocracy is for most use-cases superior and will not suffer from that flooding of the networks with artificial entities.
Sybil attacks are a problem for all P2P networks so it is not a surprise. The counter measurements are usually to make creation of an identity either expensive or determined by other(s) entity or by some sort of consensus which can be based on meritocracy.
Hard to say in such a general view what will work and what not. Better to focus on a concrete problem and try to get that solved in the right way.
The Bisq DAO has several aspect of all those issues but luckily we are in a relative good position as BTC is part of the whole structure and makes things much easier. E.g. in the Bisq DAO all DOA activities (voting, requests,…) will have fees to avoid spam/sock puppets. So if someone wants to hurt the DAO it will become expensive and will indirectly add value to the DAO as the more fees are burnt the higher the BSQ price will be. But that is for sure one of the easiest problems to solve. Others will come and we will see how well we are prepared…

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powerfull stuff there. Yes the everything for free sentiment was very bad in the long run. it gave the impression that information online has no value compared to physical things. Maybe this is also partly the reason people don’t mind so much if their emails are being read compared to physical mail.

My concern is less about AI for sockpuppets but more about it being used to make the enormous amounts of data on human interactions readable and even predictable. Facebook or google already knows if you’re suicidial or gay even if you don’t know it yourself. With a system like this in place you could analyze how memes spread inject ideas in the form of memes like a drop in the ocean and perfect the ripples it creates.
This opens the door to the worst imaginable dystopia where you’re won’t able to recognize if your thoughts are your own. Algorithms might feed you with certain memes fitting to your personal profile and every change on your core believes will feel as a natural realization and logical progression of your beeing. You yourself will become the bot.
I know this sounds absolutely crazy but at the same time i truly believe this is inevitable if we don’t manage to encrypt almost everything and take back control over our data.

Yes this is surely a good approach. In cryptospace or better in the bitcoinspace is luckily a fair amount of suspicion about outside forces taking over and therefore not very open to compromises.

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Yes I share your concerns but I think a lot is connected to the economic constraints we are living in. Manipulation and seduction was not invented by the capitalist system but it got a huge push. Advertising has done already a lot of damage and infiltrated the brains to a concerning extent. That will become for sure more concerning with the increased possibilities of AI.
But I think once more and more people are liberated from the current economic constraints the attraction to work on that area will get reduced. Many developers are unfortunately attracted by the interesting technical possibilities of those fields sufficiently to forget about the content they help to create. But part of the problem is that there are also not many alternatives. With DAOs we get those alternatives and we can create projects serving the commons without being bound to sick economic models which enslave peoples minds and destroys our environment. Maybe too much hope on DAOs etc.,… but at least we have more options than 10 years ago…

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Cryptocurrency will change our world and will give every human the opportunity for a meaningful life, free from hunger and poverty.

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I just recently read this terrifying article regarding AI and personalised ads.

The amount of unhappiness that this will generate is unfathomable. If love on first sight can be manufactured, reality will never be able to live up to your expectations.

The documentaries by Adam Curtis are also extremely interesting in that regards although they are seriously depressing and i don’t like his conclusions regarding individualism and chaotic order.

Yes this is also my hope. That more people break free from their mental patterns about how the world is supposed to work and emancipate themselves by building their own systems.
Alternatives are only limited by our imagination and the capacity to think outside the box.

I have a small manufacturing company where we produce stuff and for me this is a political endeavor about how to a create a company outside of the known models. We try to make the whole company transparent and everyone is encouraged to participate in designing the company in fact i don’t have much say about how the production is arranged because obviously the people involved in the production know far better what works.
But the programs and their appeal to authority are running really deep inside of people. I sometimes still see in my coworkers that they find comfort in complaining about something instead of changing it themselves and making it better for everyone involved.
The thing is: by complaining you don’t risk anything and gain nothing instead of unfounded superiority. By doing/changing something you risk being wrong and/or being the target of complaints for the possible reward of making it better for everyone. It is also infinitely more satisfying and empowering.

This is the reason why i love the concept of the DAO and why i came to the crypto space in the first place. Although i am still not sure if it is useful for a small company like ours (yet) where you can solve every dispute face to face but i am certain that it has immense potential above a certain scale or for organisations where participants are not at the same location.

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Thanks for the link. Interesting article!

"The driving force behind this trend is extremely simple — profits.

And this is not a scary doomsday scenario, this actually is happening today.
Is this good or bad ?

I have no idea. But surely we need few things: broad public discussions about this technology inevitable arrival and a backup plan to stop it. So, it’s better to start thinking now — how we can fight this process and benefit from it at the same time."

I don’t belief that we can stop the development nor that a broad public discussion will help - the max. result of that would be a kind of regulation, a political interference, and in most places that makes things worse, or at least does not solve the real problem but just makes the symptoms a bit less severe.

I think the answer he gave himself in his first sentence: “The driving force behind this trend is extremely simple — profits.”

The driving force behind many of those threatening developments in our society is the core of capitalism: Profit maximization. There is no room for human rights, privacy protection, freedom, etc. A capitalistic company is successful if it maximizes it’s profit.
What is needed are new alternative models to that unhealthy form of one-dimensional capitalism.

Money is the enabler of capitalism and a new form of money - as we see it with Bitcoin and even more with new DAO tokens - will give ground for new economic models which have not profit maximization as it’s sole purpose but that what the DAO stakeholders define as their goal of the DAO. That can be anything between pure altruistic motivations to pure capitalistic profit-orientated motivation, but the difference is the DAO stakeholders are responsible, it’s their creation, their beast.
This subtle difference in accountability and responsibility creates a value on it’s own: Reputation
Reputation can be seen as a new form of “money” with the new possibilities of crypto currencies.

The reason why I think that my vision here is not completely based on wishful thinking alone is that we see such in real life since ever, it just has never scaled and in competition to a model which scaled massively globally it lost ground. In private life, in family friend, small communities we have all those mix of real human values and someone who reduced all his relationships to profit maximization will have no real friends but is just “networking”. What we need is representation of those values and make them scale so they can compete with those models which have global scale but lacking human value.

Your company sounds like a good example for a cooperative approach and I am sure it will be of benefit (as Toyota has proven) also on the economical side. I agree that for local projects a real DAO might be an overkill at least at the current state where it is not trivial at all to setup a DAO. Maybe in a few years it will become easier and more accessible and then might benefit with some aspects also those who don’t need to full DAO spectrum.

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this is a beautiful point.
This person might profit if you measure it in BTC but viewed in a more holistic way this person is actually having a loss in meaningful connections with others and the world. I believe sustainable self-interest naturally tries to maximise the latter. Profit in numbers is not only bad but should be a tool to enable the meaningful.
There really is the need for representation of these values.

I think this is also the main part of the crisis we’re in in the west. Everything that was greater than us, like God, our heritage, the collective society, died and left us in a vacuum.
The nihilism of “nothing really matters” was filled with consumption, fame and superficial success but this is inherently unsatisfactory because a sense of real purpose is missing.
Maybe the only bigger vision that emerged is transhumanism with the idea of the Individual essentially striving to become god. But this is also based on a superficial equation only. A long life is good therefor living forever is better. And fails to give a deeper answer to why you should live longer.

The DAO is a great new form of human interaction but as you mentioned it is only a blank canvas that has to be filled with a vision. I am really hoping that this will lead to a phase of experimentation and Self-discovery about shared and meaningful purpose and not the recycling of the same old ideas.

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Transhumanism seems to me like the orgasmic peak of a culture dominated by individualism. Very contrary to Asian philosophy where the transcendence of the ego is a key for the development of the mind.
I am more attracted by those cultures which take emphasis on care for others like I am more attracted by people who care for others.
Hard to say where we are going, it’s in our hands and we never had so much possibilities ever before. So we should take care…

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Yes its time to explore alternatives :slight_smile: