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!
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.
Thanks for the answer! Unfortunately, I have been busy so i couldnt answer. But I have another question: If multisig is finished in bisq 2, will there be sepa trades with the reputation system possible? So, for example, I could pick a user with high reputation and perform a sepa trade, which would greatly reduce the risk of the trade partner calling my bank and causing problems, right?
And is there an ETA for when multisig comes to bisq 2 or maybe a rough plan, like will it come in 2026 or 2027? Thanks in advance!
Right now efforts are in making Bisq 1 a safe platform. Bisq 2 musig will be delayed because of the exploit at May 1st, but ETA was not clear then anyways (I’d say a few months, but now it’s harder to tell).
Account signing and reputation will be quite different for Bisq 2 musig, respective to Bisq 1, but I don’t know the details of how it works, if it has been already decided for good.