Made my first btc-fiat exchange on a decentralized exchange and made a shocking discovery...

TL;DR: Strg+f shocking I have known about Bisq for years. Always thinking "Ye, ye, it's nice that it exists. I'll give it a try some time". I hadn't traded bitcoin since my former go-to exchange decided to hand over user data to the police without a court order. The daily news about KYC, AML, and other 3rd party drama really made me lose interest in purchasing btc as well. So I coasted along on what ever bitcoin I owned, just making random purchases here and there. Along came the other day and I finally decided to install Bisq and trade some bitcoin again. Bisq connected to my full node and set everything up for me. I selected a trading offer, made a security deposit into a multisig wallet and waited for the fiat payment to be finalized. Fiat confirmation came within 24h and the trade was through. Just. Like. That. I can't put into words how liberating it felt to make that trade without a nosy, parasitic third party surveilling and meddling with my actions. https://preview.redd.it/e8m0tfv9kyw31.png?width=1255&format=png&auto=webp&s=bf1a0d7f7a909ac533d7011b5da8bbbd144f259e At this moment I was euphoric. I was already dreaming about how all I needed to be fulfilled would be conf tx when I discovered a small caveat. There were about 20 open trades of which many originated from the same onion address. At first this lead me to believe that I was possibly one of maybe a dozen people making use of Bisq. But since making a purchase or selling BTC doesn't require every individual user to post an offer (after all I didn't create a buy/sell offer either) I duckduckgoed some Bisq usage stats. On CMC Bisq ranks so far down that it only marginally sets itself apart form the exchanges that boast a 0BTC 24h trading volume... And while Bisq itself paints a slightly better picture. It is still shocking to see how incredibly underutilized the software is. Reading all the regular Bitpay and 3rd party hate around here has obviously skewed my expectations. Even when considering that Bisq's design essentially precludes wash trading and other trade vol. inflating use cases... I simply expected more. As far as I can tell Bisq is the only truly decentralized exchange out there. Everything else listed on bitcoin.org under p2p exchanges is far from p2p considering it requires signing up, scanning IDs, trusting btc to 3rd party controlled escrow etc. Which makes me wonder: Am I missing some part of the puzzle? Isn't Bisq virtually the exchange method that squares most with Bitcoin's ethos of decentralization? If so, how come it appears to be such a fringe occurrence? submitted by /u/xep426 [link] [comments]