Privacy and Growth

Promotion
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See: Privacy-Protecting Growth Tactics || BISQ BRIEF for 06 Dec 2019

I think we can all agree that privacy practices can always be improved. The two primary appeals to bisq is privacy and decentralization. More should be done to make the software friendly for the average user and protect them from themselves by baking in more operational security.

I also think more needs to be done to promote bisq. At the moment, you have almost no social media presence. Bitcoin and crypto twitter is constantly booming but bisq is rarely in the mix. Almost nobody visits the live streams. Contributors rarely show up on podcasts to increase awareness. Where is your memelord?

PRIVACY

Problem: In order to have a discussion on the community board, you have to KYC yourself by adding an email address. Unless you have good opsec, trust is required. The average user isn’t going to have enough knowledge for proper opsec here.

Solution: Stop trying to track users for analytics and marketing. Don’t even give the option to add an email address because most won’t know that is a bad idea. If you want to spread the word, there are better ways.

Problem: If you click an address or transaction in bisq, it links to an onion address by default (excellent) but for the average user, they’re not going to know how to automatically open onion addresses with tor browser.

Solution: [Windows/OSX] During the install process, the installer should check for tor browser and then pause and recommend that you install it before continuing. The installer should also link .onion address to open with Tor Browser Bundle by default. [Linux] Tor Browser Bundle should be a dependency.

Problem: You must KYC yourself in order to contribute via Github or youtube.

Solution: It should be recommended to users to not associate their official github or youtube accounts when contributing. Most people doing any serious contributions will already be aware, but people who might just want to post a bug or ask questions may not.

The wizard that was mentioned is a great idea! You should incorporate something similar on the website too and provide learning tools for basic opsec.

There should be a dedicated category here for each of the weekly live streams. Part of the reason nobody shows up is because of scheduling. Give everyone the opportunity to bring things up specifically for these meetings in case they can’t attend and then it can be discussed there and then further in their absence on the live stream.

Problem: Opsec is hard.

Solution: Has anyone on the team considered creating a hardened linux distro that focuses on privacy and has bisq, tor browser and privacy focused wallets installed by default? I know that would be a huge burden to maintain, but it would be a useful tool to many if they could just boot up a usb stick and feel that they’re doing everything correctly by default.

GROWTH

Problem: Low liquidity and adoption.

Solution: Bisq needs to do far more crypto podcasts to promote progress and adoption. Be more active on twitter - fucking nobody is talking about you. Every time an exchange fucks up, you should be ready for an emergency podcast on WhatBitcoinDid, Let’sTalkBitcoin, etc. Intermingle in the space. Interview with Andreas. Interview with Elizabeth Stark. In fact, start your own podcast and start interviewing other people - then you have free advertising as people will come to see them and then hear about bisq by default.

These are my thoughts on this most recent Privacy and Growth Meeting. Discuss.

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That is, in my point of view the most crucial problem. Remember all of the today’s cyber juggernauts started to catch market share no matter what the costs were. Bisq is the best kept secret on the inet. I wouldn’t mind, if there were enough volume in trades so the place would be liquid but flying under the radar at the same time - but you can’t have it both.

An idea i always had in mind for this would to allow bisq to be run as a white label, but adding to all bids and asks, thus increasing usability.

What i mean in laymen terms: allow to run bisq apps which can be called anything else than bisq, but will feed into the pool of open orders of all bisq and white label users

If you allow this all the grey markets could be worked on without tainting father bisq. And increasing volume and agility of the market space.

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Yes its a major problem. Anyone first starting with crypto will probably not think too hard of the privacy implications and then well bitcoin is traceable so you are stuffed.
Just in general the web is annoying, every site wants your email when they dont need it.
I use a password manager and i wont ever need a password reset. Linking/IDing you via email address sucks ass and its almost impossible to get a anon email without verifying via sms. Even better some some of PKI sign in. Jesus christ the tech is there.

My major gripe with bisq itself is the fiat trades are published and banks/state can probably correlate it to find the bisq user.
The EXACT fiat amounts are not needed. Who cares of the EXACT volume of bisq. Help the privacy of users and fuzz/obscure these financial detail, perhaps also delay publishing of this data to help worth timing analyses reasons. The rounding is not enough imho.
Considering its easy to place fake volume by trading with yourself it just hurts users than doing any good.

keybase is an interesting platform. Signed up and installed easy enough via qubes.