Maker Fees

Hey,

Just to give you some insight, I’ve been “market making” on the LTC/EUR market by way of having an offer up for several days now and no takers. It’s time to take the offer down, so I will now lose 0.06 maker fee (where does this actually go?!)

This seems really bad for the initial market making period to start getting that initial traffic on a market like this.

This was also mentioned here: Loss of fee on canceled open trade is too expensive

I think the suggested alternative in the linked post sounds reasonable.

Well we do need it for spam protection, but I do understand your worries.
Maybe it would be a good idea to risk it in the beginning in order to make it easier for the markets to get started, but it is trivial to make a new offer and it seems very reasonable to expect someone making 100 fake offers in one day even manually, as soon as we remove it.
With current number of offers, 100 fake offers would make trading a lot more difficult.

Perhaps it would be reasonable to do something with account age verification, at least for few months, until attackers could catch up, but this would require dev effort for something that it quite short lived. For example, offers with accounts created in last 2 months would have no fee, but that would only affect a certain portion of Bisq users and the solution would only be in place for few months.

Unfortunately, it really seems like there is no fix for this. Offers are chosen by people manually, so spam protection from making fake offers needs to be high enough that an attacker would experience significant costs even for example 100 fake offers.

We will have to see what @ManfredKarrer thinks about this and if there is a way we could maybe reasonably decrease the spam protection in the early days of Bisq for market making purposes.