BBB bisq Review

Bisq – Is It Good?

Bisq (formerly known as BitSquare) is a P2P anonymous cryptocurrency exchange. However, it isn’t your traditional exchange. Just like bitcoin is a decentralized currency, they’re a decentralized organization that gives its users the ability to connect and exchange currencies. Although more complicated than the average exchange, their processes have gained Bisq a small but loyal audience that value the lengths they’re willing to go to protect anonymity.

What Does Bisq give you?

Bisq has a somewhat unique way of facilitating transactions. In most other exchanges, the exchange happens by connecting the users into the exchange’s servers, where the transaction is processed. This gives the exchange a huge amount of authority since it holds all the cards.

Bisq does things differently. Instead of connecting people to their servers, it connects them to a trading network running on Blockchain technology. By doing that in ensures that the only person you’re sharing your information is the person you’re dealing with, avoiding to share anything to even the exchange itself. This means a new level of anonymity where the exchange doesn’t just gives you the chance to be anonymous by promising to not tell anyone what you’re doing, it simply can’t tell anyone because even they don’t know the full details. That also means Bisq never hold users funds nor collects users data.

However, this process is more complicated than most other process by design, because every exchange has to be recorded on its own blockchain. If you are an active trader, this may prove inconvenient because you have to pay Bisq its small fee before the order is filled.

Supported Countries

Bisq is growing, reaching places like India and China (where cryptocurrency isn’t legal) to give the people a choice, even when the banks and governments are trying to limit them. However they’re yet to reach some countries.

Countries not supported:

Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan.

Countries with limited support:

China, Russia.

Bisq Rates and Buying Limits

Bisq offers unlimited amount of trades. However, it imposes limits on trade amounts to discourage fraud using fiat money. Those limits will depend on the payment method of your choice. For most bank-based payment methods like SEPA or Zelle the trade limit is 0.5 BTC per trade. For services like Swish, PerfectMoney and AliPay it is 1 BTC. For recently-added payment methods like Revolut, Popmoney, and MoneyBeam (N26) the trade limit is 0.25 BTC.

To further discourage fraud, new fiat payment accounts have even smaller limits. When you first add a bank-based account, your limit will be 25% of its full trade limit. This limit will increase by 25% every month until it reaches its full limit.

Bisq rate: 0.1% of the trade amount for offers, 0.3% of the trade amount for offer takers. Minimum of 0.00005 BTC in both.

Although their fees are dynamic, they’re fairly standard compared to the rest of the industry.

Bisq Pros

  • Anonymity: The main reason why people look at Bisq is because of their innovative way to keep people anonymous. The way it’s designed prevents holding funds or storing the user’s data.
  • Arbitrator system: Bisq offers a team of arbitrators to solve any dispute between users.
  • Fully decentralized: Since it’s completely decentralized, it cannot be affected by outside interferences.
  • Safe: Although it offers its users anonymity, their open source code makes them as transparent as possible. They never hold users’ funds which makes them very reliable.
  • Easy: The platform is surprisingly easy to use and friendly to new users, you don’t even have to register.

Bisq Cons

  • Transaction speed: Most P2P exchanges aren’t very fast to begin with. Bisq’s system, while safe, makes every transaction even slower.
  • Inferior trading volumes: With such a strong control over trading volumes, Bisq isn’t for the avid and active trader.

Go to bisq

Is Bisq Good For Bitcoin?

With anonymous exchanges you often have to sacrifice something for your privacy. In the case of Bisq, that something is its trading volume. Their decentralized, anonymous nature proves to be a double-edged sword: It keeps its users’ privacy while making smaller and slower transactions.

On paper their idea is truly amazing. However we hope to keep seeing improvements so they can truly be of use to everyone. However, Bisq is simple to use, has a great response team and, if you aren’t bothered by small transactions and slow speeds, it’s a great way to remain anonymous whilst buying crypto.