Updated my May 2023 guide about RoboSats and Bisq and made the presentation more palatable with Markdown. Hope this is useful to someone out there:
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RoboSats is short for Robotic Satoshi. It lets you generate a robotic avatar when exchanging your sats.
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RoboSats employs the Lightning Network whereas Bisq facilitates only on-chain Bitcoin payments. So, you can swap Lightning Network BTC to on-chain BTC and vice versa on RoboSats. Note that RoboSats is so far the only platform that uses LN as the trading currency, giving it an edge over Hodl Hodl Bisq, & LocalCoinSwap.
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RoboSats requires you to use it with the Tor browser. Bisq also uses Tor but Tor is already in-built into the payment protocol of this desktop application. Bisq comes with a trading token called BSQ - which may be distasteful to people who have zero tolerance for shitcoins.
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Since RoboSats uses the Lightning Network, it has a 3 million sat limit to ensure that transactions can go through completely.
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Bisq wallet can be imported into Electrum. This facilitates your management of the funds you buy from Bisq over LN.
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Both platforms require you to have BTC first before you can buy BTC - as an assurance that you won’t waste other users’ time with empty promises.
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Make your RoboSats order and Bisq order on Nostr.
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Many users use platforms like Strike, Revolut, CashApp and even PayPal to accept payments but if you are particular about your privacy, cash by mail orders, Amazon gift cards or even cash in person would be your best bet.
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Bisq is non-custodial and decentralised, which makes it harder to be shut down. Bisq is FOSS, so you can contribute proposals aimed to improve it. RoboSats could be shut down if the sole operator were arrested for whatever reason.
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If you run your own node, you can apply to be a RoboSats Federation Coordinator. Having experience with node management helps with Bisq too as you need to update the bitcoin.conf file and connect to an unknown node to make transactions happen.