First of all, I have never made this mistake since the rule was added, so I’m not sore about having lost any money or anything.
Yesterday, I read the specifics about the punishments for bad behaviour when trading on Bisq, and one of them is getting less money if you enter anything related to Bisq or Bitcoin in the “reason for payment” when making a bank transfer.
I have no problem with this, but I do have a problem with how this is presented to the user. Or rather, how it is not presented to the user.
The screen which tells you to make the bank transfer to buy Bitcoin has no mention whatsoever of what you are to do with the “reason for payment” field. It used to show a little cryptic id string, before the new rule was added. But now it says nothing about it at all.
Why doesn’t it say something like this with bold letters: “PLEASE DO NOT TYPE ANYTHING AS THE ‘REASON FOR PAYMENT’, UNLESS EXPLICITLY TOLD SO BY YOUR TRADE PARTNER!”?
If I started using Bisq right now, and never saw the little one-time update message which mentioned this new rule, I would most likely type something like “Bisq”, “Bitcoin” or the actual trade id string from the application as the “reason for payment”.
Perhaps my bank is unique, but it has a big window saying: “IMPORTANT: ADD THE REASON FOR PAYMENT IN THIS FIELD!”
So my bank (and probably many others) are literally pushing us to violate Bisq’s rule, and Bisq doesn’t make any effort to mention this rule. Unless I’m blind and confused.
It would be a very good idea to make this crystal clear to avoid people being punished for violating the Bisq trading protocol.
When the change was made, from using trade ID to leave it blank, there were several popups. Now it’s on trading rules and wiki penalties, but I don’t know if there are more alerts in the app.
Users are following this rule in a high percentage, but if there are no other indications in the app for it I agree that it should be indicated at least when creating the account.
I also agree that adding this as a field in the payment details pane would be useful.
Myself, being the privacy conscious individual that I am, I’ve thought about NOT placing any btc mention in the payment reason even before starting to use bisq and reading the rules, back at the time, but I understand how other could think differently.
I will be publishing an issue on the github repo to ask for it to be added, as I feel it’s just tedious to do, but not hard, and could positively impact the general trading experience of users.
I actually noticed this earlier today when I made a new trade to buy Bitcoin. I probably have mentally started ignoring the pop-up, instead clicking it away and directly going to the list of “open offers”. So even though Bisq does show this information, after all, I still maintain that this should be clarified in every screen where it shows the details for how to perform the transaction, since it’s so important and it’s so easy to start “mentally ignoring” pop-up screens.
I am interested, but Github is one of the numerous websites which simply don’t allow account registration no matter what I try. I’ve long given up on my attempts to use that site.
