Is privacy an issue with SEPA trades?

Support
1

Hey, so I would like to buy and sell crypto with bisq using sepa payments. I am quite new to this, but as far as I understand you have to use bisq easy to get you first bitcoin and then you can trade on bisq 1 properly. But for both platforms, when you use sepa payments, that would mean the other person would see your full name and your bank account number. Also the country you live in and bank you are at. Plus you can sometimes even see the academic degree of the other person (if they added that in the name). These infos are pretty specific and with a little bit of reasearch you could at least narrow down the pool of possible people who own the bisq account. Isn’t that a huge privacy risk? I mean what if someone decides to sell my info somewhere on the darknet or similar? I just feel like that is not really safe.

Maybe some experienced users can tell me, if that is a valid concern or not? Or are there any alternative payment methods who are more anonymous? Any help is definitely appreciated!

2

Any bank related transaction has privacy concerns, otherwise Bitcoin would not be necessary.
The person you’re trading with could know the amount of BTC you have been involved in a Bisq trade, unless you do some utxo hygiene. They will know your name and all the info the bank share, like bank account number and, as you say, if he’s a doctor in some countries.

It’s a valid concern, you can think that some users may leak that info on purpose, but for a single trade is not worth a lot. Bisq knows nothing about it. In a centalized exchange, the exchange knows all the trades you’ve done, and they add that info to a database with more users, increasing the value of a successful attack.

Using SEPA or trading p2p, and even using Bitcoin for better privacy, is never a yes/no answer. It’s always a trade off: even cash transactions have its own kind of risks.