Just downloaded the s/w and am keen to begin trading. I have hit the barrier of entry described here and wanted to ask a question without digging that thread up.
I am looking to create an offer to buy BTC with USD and find that the default buyer deposit is 0.03 BTC yet the seller is only to provide, by default, 0.01 BTC as deposit. What is the rationale behind the buyer providing a deposit 3 times higher than the seller? Obviously I understand I can edit the deposit but then am warned that my trade may become less attractive.
Seller always has the trade amount of BTC locked in a multisig as well as his security deposit, while buyer only has his security deposit locked up. This makes sellers more likely to follow the protocol, as they can’t simply not send the money when the trade starts, like a buyer can.
Thanks @alexej996 for the quick response. I’ve been away on holiday for the past few weeks so sorry for taking a while to respond.
The logic makes sense to a certain degree. Any purchase of less than 0.03 BTC will mean the buyer incurs a greater deposit than that of the actual purchase. One must purchase over 0.03 BTC to see the deposit become less than the desired transaction. Then an offer to purchase 0.5 BTC has the same deposits, in this case the seller will lock in 0.501 BTC and the buyer only 0.03 BTC. Whilst I understand the requirement for a deposit to encourage the transaction to complete, it seems strange to have picked these seemingly arbitrary values as opposed to %age values based upon that of the transaction.
Either way the barrier of entry remains for those wishing to make small speculative purchases in order to build trust in the exchange, which to me seems to be counter-productive in terms of encouraging adoption from new buyers and sellers.
It is hard to reach an agreement on the exact value, but this was what the developer found as a best option at the time. Now that it is custom it is up to the users to decide for the best amount.
Yeah, that is why there is a category on this forum called the starter package to ask people to lend you some BTC to start, but there wasn’t a big use for it ,as far as I am aware, since most people have friends or some other way to get some bitcoins for start the trade.
I agree, I wanted to try and start using Bisq so I deposited 0.1 bitcoin just to test the water. I put a sell offer into Bisq for 0.05 bitcoin because I needed to pay the fees also. Then I sat wondering why nothing was happening, I waited for days an nothing. Next the price moved and I decided I needed to change my offer to % based price instead as I never expected it to take so long! Again I wait for days and no takers for my sell offer. Now I have read this post it makes perfect sense, why would anybody want to have to deposit 0.03 bitcoin just to buy 0.05 bitcoin, makes no sense!
I think this needs rethinking , it is not a working setup right now. I am disappointed with Bisq now because I have incurred 3 times offer fees submitting sell offers that were unlikely to ever find a buyer under the current deposit scheme.
Again, I am only trying to get comfortable with Bisq and in future it would be unlikely I would make such small sell offers but I need to gain confidence in the process before putting larger amounts of my capital into Bisq.
Yes, perhaps it would be better if the custom security deposit was percentage based.
But of course, you can always set a custom security deposit.
Bigger security deposits give better security for both traders equally, but it might be an improvement to set a default security deposit in percentage, but I do doubt that will change the time of trade much.
The fact is that what Bisq could use the most is more traders to make and take more offers.
Technology is pretty good, it is just that there is practically little to no marketing as an decentralized open source software. Just like other open source projects, it is most useful if people recommend it to others, that would help the most in user experience.