Why does my computer need to be online for my offer to stay on the network?

I am new to bisq, I just submitted an offer to sell BTC but it tells me I have to keep bisq running in the background and computer online 24/7 in order to keep my offer on the network. This is ridiculous. I am not home all the time, I turn off all electronics at night because it’s healthy and I certainly don’t condone wasting electricity just so I can sell $50 worth of BTC. This has to be fixed asap if you want more people to use it. I am sure it’s not that hard to keep the offer online as long as it hasn’t sold. Craigslist can do it…

Craigslist can do it…

Craigslist is centralized, Bisq is not. That is one of the reasons but there are ways that offers could be kept online. It would probably make a worse user experience though as you wouldn’t know how long it would take for a maker to even be aware their offer was taken.

I understand what nancie0213 is saying.

However, privacy comes at a cost. If you don’t care about your privacy, use LocalBitcoins. But as a small trader from the very beginning I only can say, you better be online as well when you trade on that platform.

Alternatively you can use a centralized exchange. But guess what. When you are offline their servers continue to consume power. You pay that power as well. Most exchanges call that “fees”.

Then, imagine you are a regular trader. Then you will be anyway online all the time.

And if you are a small trader, like you (us$50), why should your trade takes hours. May be the liquidity of Bisq at the moment is not very high, so you have a point, but once there is enough dept in the market you can sell our us$50 in less than an hour, similar to LB.

But it is a fair concern. The less energy we use the better.

As has been mentioned, Bisq is decentralized so each node is running their part of the exchange. There is no central point that holds your private keys. For a trade to start each peer need to be online to sign their part of the transaction. It would be possible to keep offers online by other nodes when you are offline but it would be useless since it wouldn’t be possible to take that offer as no one is there to trade.

Decentralized systems don’t work like centralized ones and it takes some time to get used to. In the case of Bisq there is a need to be online to be able to participate and trade. That’s unavoidable when there are not trusted third parties.