Robosats: A P2P Fiat-to-Bitcoin Trading Site with Lightning Support \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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Robosats: A P2P Fiat-to-Bitcoin Trading Site with Lightning Support

210 sats \ 35 comments \ @supertestnet 17 Feb 2022 bitcoin

A new service launched yesterday called robosats:

http://robosats6tkf3eva7x2voqso3a5wcorsnw34jveyxfqi2fu7oyheasid.onion/

It's basically a bisq clone except with lightning support and a web based interface. Market makers create offers to buy or sell bitcoin and name a payment method and a spread. Takers check the list of offers and take ones that appeal to them. Both parties put up 1% of the trade as collateral which they get back at the end of the trade if all goes well. Robosats uses hodl invoices and cancels the collateral payment at the end of the trade. Trades have a time limit of 6 hours.

After collateral is deposited, the bitcoin seller sends the amount of bitcoin in the contract to robosats using another hodl invoice. Robosats keeps the payment pending for now and tells the bitcoin buyer it's time for them to send the USD (or other tender) to the bitcoin seller. Robosats waits til the seller confirms they received the money or opens a dispute. If there is no dispute within the 6 hour time limit or if the bitcoin seller confirms they received the money, robosats settles the seller's payment, uses those funds to pay the bitcoin buyer, and boom, the trade is done.

Buyers and sellers have a rating system and there is a cool no-login-required setup where a new identity is generated for users every time they go to the site (with one caveat, see next sentence). The identity is tied to a password-like string that the site gives you, and you can optionally restore an old identity by typing it into a box on the homepage (that way you can get your ratings back). The site is called robosats because all users get a robot avatar.

Check it out today! Use a browser like brave or tor browser to connect to the onion domain. It's a great proof of concept and I hope to work with the founder to make it non-custodial.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @P2P_bitcoin 13 May 2022

UPDATE: So awesome to see Robosats growing!

Lightning network⚡ P2P trading platform, RoboSats, growing fast! #28035

2 sats \ 11 replies \ @thrown 17 Feb 2022

Awesome concept!

in the Privacy section, I would advise mentioning that most ways of getting fiat to a person will inevitably dox that person. Unless you have a recommendation for how to do that anonymously?
it very briefly mentions that RoboSats will help resolve disputes. To me this is a big point that needs elaboration. I assume this is using the Lightning Escrow technology and RoboSats is acting as an independent escrow implementation? How can they resolve disputes exactly? If users are anonymous, how can anyone really be “punished”?

1 sat \ 2 replies \ @supertestnet OP 17 Feb 2022

I assume this is using the Lightning Escrow technology and RoboSats is acting as an independent escrow implementation?

It's not using lightning escrow yet. I am the lead engineer at lightning escrow and I reached out to the robosats dev yesterday to talk about a collaboration. I hope he takes the best parts of our backend soon and adds them to robosats to reduce the trust required.

How can they resolve disputes exactly? If users are anonymous, how can anyone really be “punished”?

It depends on the payment method. Some people are using it for swapping between lightning and the base layer. If there's a dispute where one party says "he didn't send the right amount to my bitcoin address" you can check the blockchain to see what happened. Alt-to-btc trades can work similarly. For fiat trades, it gets harder.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @thrown 17 Feb 2022

he didn't send the right amount to my bitcoin address

Yes and what happens in that scenario? Nothing really, right?

It’s not like RoboSats is reimbursing people for damages.

4 sats \ 0 replies \ @supertestnet OP 17 Feb 2022

Yes and what happens in that scenario?

If he agreed to send $50 in bitcoin to the other guy's bitcoin address and doesn't do it, the cheater loses his collateral (1% of the trade) because robosats keeps it instead of returning it to him, and robosats also uses the lightning network to return the $50 in escrow to the cheated party. Which means the cheater doesn't gain anything and loses 50 cents (1% of the $50 at stake).

0 sats \ 7 replies \ @deleted231216 17 Feb 2022

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0 sats \ 6 replies \ @thrown 17 Feb 2022

i suppose you could build a somewhat profitable business using a PO Box. Serving a need of some kind.

The question is if it is truly worth your time. Maybe if you make $100 off of each trade it would be.

1 sat \ 5 replies \ @deleted231216 18 Feb 2022

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51 sats \ 4 replies \ @supertestnet OP 18 Feb 2022

I wonder if cash can be withdrawn from paywithmoon.com cards. There is currently no fee for creating them. I want to get a credit card encoder, encode a hotel card or similar with data from a paywithmoon card, and then try to withdraw cash from it. I think I could do that by going to walmart, getting a money order (costs 85 cents), paying for it with the re-encoded card, and then cashing the money order at the same walmart later. If it works it might save you 4-9% on fees.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @deleted231216 19 Feb 2022

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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @o 16 May 2022

thebtcco offers international prepaid visa cards which you could then add to Google Pay or Apple Pay

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @supertestnet OP 19 Feb 2022

Walmart and USPS both require an id to cash out a money order. In theory they shouldn't know that it's related to bitcoin. If that is still risky, one option is to not make the money order out to yourself but make it out to a friend and have him or her cash it with their id.

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @deleted231216 20 Feb 2022

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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @deleted231216 17 Feb 2022

+100 sats. Looks great. :) Happy to see a new KYC-free exchange with flexible payment options (easy to offer cash by mail, cash in person or gold/silver) that works in Tor Browser.

I wonder if it could be forked to provide a marketplace for products/services. Robosats has an open field for fiat payment method, so this field could be adapted to support product listings (but would need to add title, description & photo, plus a search feature).

1 sat \ 3 replies \ @nout 17 Feb 2022

It sucks that we don't really have good non-KYC payment methods for fiat... it's all Revolut, Zelle, etc.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @deleted231216 17 Feb 2022

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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @nout 17 Feb 2022

Are any gift cards working well electronically? Also where does one buy such gift cards (without having to associate ID)?

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @deleted231216 18 Feb 2022

Amazon gift cards or other popular gift cards that you can buy in brick-and-mortar stores with cash. If you can buy KYC-free Vanilla Visa or MasterCard gift cards where you live, that would also work. For example, you can trade gift cards for Bitcoin with Redeeem.com.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @TutorialBTCEng 17 Feb 2022 freebie

It's kind of confusing. Good to put these improvements.

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Steps of how it works
payment options

Put language Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Russian
to take advantage of the resources that these 3 sites in Europe have to diversify other payment options from various countries

https://getbittr.com/

https://pocketbitcoin.com/

https://relai.app/

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @P2P_bitcoin 14 Mar 2022

Here's a post on SN on a new feature added:

Non-KYC P2P trading platform RoboSats price API, Bitcoin selling 5% or more above spot #14475 https://robosats.onion.moe/api/price/

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @P2P_bitcoin 26 Mar 2022

There's now a Twitter feed for new offers:

https://twitter.com/robosatsOB

0 sats \ 7 replies \ @ideasourcing 18 Feb 2022

There needs to be a way to see the payment methods that the sellers are willing to accept. Great service btw. Any way to invest sats in it? Like be a small shareholder in Robosats?

1 sat \ 6 replies \ @supertestnet OP 20 Feb 2022

You'd have to talk to the founder, who I am trying to gradually schmooze into a conversation about a merger with lightningescrow.io. Usually the seed rounds for these things are only open to rich people with multi-tens-of-thousands of dollars to invest.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @ideasourcing 20 Feb 2022

Yeah, I can put in, like $40-50,000 if it's a solid project with BTC-ish returns possible. But wouldn't it be great if we truly make it lightning and allow microshares with sats? What does it matter if 1 person is giving 50k or if 10k are giving 50k. 50k is 50k!

2 sats \ 4 replies \ @supertestnet OP 21 Feb 2022

Yeah, I can put in, like $40-50,000 if it's a solid project with BTC-ish returns possible.

Cool! I can put you in touch with the founder. Can you reach out to me via telegram (@supertestnet) or twitter (@geistlight) so I can connect you?

But wouldn't it be great if we truly make it lightning and allow microshares with sats? What does it matter if 1 person is giving 50k or if 10k are giving 50k. 50k is 50k!

I'm probably the wrong person to ask but I suspect it has something to do with accounting. The founder wants lightning escrow to be a big company, so he filed forms with the government and got on something called the Angel List Stack which is like a corporate investment website. It comes with a bank account and all sorts of other complicated stuff. Every investor in the company has to do KYC and invest with USD because Angel List Stack doesn't support bitcoin. All of this stuff presumably gets reported to the government. If he had 10k lines of investors each doing a tiny amount, it would be a headache for whoever is doing the accounting and it would also be a headache for him to communicate with them. Having a small number of investors makes everything simpler I guess.

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @ideasourcing 21 Feb 2022

Hmm, I see, then maybe official shareholders can be the big number shareholders, and people who send in sats can just be 'donations' that the founder can hint sending back 100x in return when the company does 100x

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @kc_hodl 1 Mar 2022

@ideasourcing hmu on Twitter or Telegram @kc_hodl. Would love to chat more on this topic.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @kc_hodl 1 Mar 2022 freebie

Yes, unfortunately the way the regulatory structure works for companies raising private equity- each investor must be an Accredited Investor ($1M net worth, or $200k annual income). It’s ridiculous I know, but to be on the right side of regulation companies must comply. AngelList is a great tool for early stage companies to raise capital from accredited investors because the SPV (special purpose vehicle) that is created for the investment is only 1 entry on the companies cap table, as opposed to hundreds of entries if the $ was raised from individuals. Having a clean cap table is important when the company goes to martlet to raise additional capital in the future.

I run a bitcoin specific AngelList syndicate, which you can check out via the link below if you’re interested. @supertestnet, I’ll hit you up to see if I may he able to assist the founder of Robosats.