Beside the critical gateway role of exchanges for a crypto currency I got more aware (inspired from Nick Szabo’s essay) of another crucial role: To be an economic key player for governance.
With the recent disruptions (BU a few month ago, now UASF) we got more aware that exchanges are taken serious as an important economic factor.
Though the usual way that the exchange operator decides on which side of a chain (in case of a fork) they will put their support or for which features they are willing to signal support does not fit well to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.
With Bitsquare we are pretty limited anyway due the use of BitcoinJ which automatically follows the longest PoW chain, so the users have no ability to decide what they want to support. That is pretty bad and beside the privacy issues with bloom filters another reason why we want to find alternative solutions.
Luckily there is work in progress on a SPV model for Bitcoin Core and we would love to go that route to integrate it into the app similar as we use the Tor binary inside the app. It will be transparent to the user and the resource requirements will be similar to BitcoinJ. That will fix the bloom filter privacy issue and we are always in sync with the latest development state of Bitcoin.
But with such a future model we will gain even more:
We can delegate the decision making which fork one wants to support or which feature one wants to support to the users directly. So not the developers will make the decisions but the users. We can decentralize the economic power to those who use Bitcoin.
I think that is a pretty interesting new factor in the governance model of Bitcoin and missing completely at the moment.
Beside that all the Bitsquare nodes will become at least partially validating nodes and to run such will be incentivized by the utility to exchange in a privacy protecting way.
So Bitsquare will not only serve the users with giving them better privacy and security but will also help to improve the governance of the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole by giving each trader a vote.