Why P2P for bitcoin transactions?

We all know that we should be using peer-to-peer exchanges for buying and selling bitcoin. If a KYC exchange knows that you've been buying and selling bitcoin, then it's just a short step to the government having that information. And once the government knows...well, a lot of things can happen.
In 1933 in the US, we had Executive Order 6102, basically making gold ownership illegal. What will happen with bitcoin?
And yet...the KYC exchanges are heavily promoted. They advertise on all the bitcoin podcasts, they sponsor conferences, etc. They say the right things. So they tend to be top of mind, when you're thinking of buying bitcoin.
But I'm here to tell you that it's really not that hard to buy bitcoin, peer-to-peer, on Robosats. Yes, it feels a little cloak and dagger, but it works well, and doesn't take long to learn.
And what did Satoshi say about P2P networks?
November 7, 2008 - Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.
I encourage you to take the first steps towards getting familiar with Robosats and eventually buying and selling on Robosats. I will answer any questions that I can in the comments.

First steps - starting out with Robosats

What do I need?

Access to Robosats If you have an Android phone, you can download the Robosats android app here: https://github.com/RoboSats/robosats/releases. You'll need to allow your phone to install APK files.
Or to use it on a desktop, you'll need to download the Tor brower (https://www.torproject.org/download/). Then go to https://dex.robosats.com in Tor to access the site.
Lightning wallet You will need some kind of Lightning wallet to send and receive sats. There's some suggestions here: https://learn.robosats.com/docs/wallets/.
A way of sending fiat currency Almost no transactions take place with cash F2F (face to face). The most common way to send fiat currencies to buy bitcoin are Strike, Zelle, USDT, CashApp, Revolut, Wise, Venmo, Amazon gift cards, and a lot of other country-specific payment methods. You'll need to have one of these. In the US it's often Strike, in the EU it's usually Wise or Revolut.
These are all KYC payment rails, except maybe the Amazon gift cards. But except for your trade partner, nobody will know that you made a transaction for bitcoin, not even Robosats.

An quick overview of the process

Creating your robot token Once you open the app, you'll be prompted to "create a new robot". This generates the token that is your temporary identity on Robosats. It'll look something like this: YLctzKElzMHiIrizcPw2UXjoHs1qK3BnvdSp
Copy it somewhere safe, you may need it later. But in general, once the trade is over you do not reuse the tokens.
Finding an offer Once you have your token, as a buyer of bitcoin, you want to go to the Offers tab at the bottom. In Offers, use the filters at the top to indicate that you'd like to BUY, which currency you'd like to use, and which payment method you want (Zelle, Cashapp, Revolut, etc). You'll then get a filtered list of only those offers.
On the right you'll see a Premium field. Check for offers that have a reasonable premium. It'll usually be between 1 and 3%, sometimes more. You're paying more than the normal exchange price, in exchange for privacy, which I think is a good deal.
Placing an order Once you've decided on an offer, click on it. You'll be prompted to enter the amount you'd like to buy. After you've entered that, the next step is to post a fidelity bond, usually 2 or 3%. This is a lightning payment you need to make. You'll get this back assuming you comply with all the rules. It's to ensure the order maker's time doesn't get wasted by people who don't fulfill the trade.
The fidelity bond must be paid with a lightning invoice. The next step is for you to send in a lightning receive invoice for the sats you'll receive for your fiat. This is where your sats will be paid to, when you've paid for the bitcoin in fiat.
The actual payment After this, you're waiting for the seller of bitcoin to post the trade escrow. The bitcoin seller has to post the full amount of bitcoin into this trade escrow.
Once that happens, a trader chat dialog comes up, that only you and the trader have access to. You keep it short and sweet, and don't exchange any private info. All you need to communicate is how to pay them in the chosen method of payment. For instance, the Revolut username.
Then you actually make the fiat payment, using your chosen method of fiat payment.
And then voila! After your trade partner confirms they've received the fiat, you receive the sats into your lightning wallet.

More info

If you want a detailed guide with a lot of screenshots, here's a good quality recent one: https://www.athena-alpha.com/how-to-buy-bitcoins-using-robosats
Also, you can access this website https://learn.robosats.com/ to get more info about Robosats. It's an info website, not the trading website, which should only be accessed on Tor.

Final notes

It's truly not that hard. The user interface can be a little wonky, as expected when the priority is privacy as opposed to user friendliness. But it's still quite good.
Feel free to ask questions below!
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41 sats \ 1 reply \ @Golu 17 Oct
P2P is the best model. No question whatsoever.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 17 Oct
Agreed. Who knows what will change in the future.
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Robosats its a great P2P market.
The only problem for the new users, is the bond that you need to pay in order to take or to create an offer.
Not many people have SATS on lightning ready to use.
When I need to buy or sell SATS no-KYC I use lnp2pbot and Robosats.
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Yeah for completely new users that's an issue. But if you have no other way to get sats, maybe just use a KYC method to get some sats, like Strike.
You don't need a lot. Say you wanted to buy $100 worth of BTC on Robosats. The default fidelity bond is 2% of that, so you only need $2 for the fidelity bond.
Then once you have that $100 worth of sats, you have enough of a fidelity bond for whatever size purchase you want to make on Robosats, because the purchase size currently maxes out at at $3280.
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Maybe one day I’ll turn my robosats article into an SN post
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Nice! I like the Amazon gift card example.
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Taking p2p all the way!
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are there any issues liquidity issues with doing bigger purchases, like if i wanted to do 500 euro or something?
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I haven't heard of any. The max purchase size on Robosats is currently $3280.
Of course, for a larger amount it would be a little bit more difficult to transmit it through lightning. But if the invoice fails, you submit another invoice and try again. I haven't heard of anyone actually not receiving their sats that they've purchased.
It's trickier for people on Robosats who are selling bitcoin. Some payment methods (Paypal and others) allow chargebacks. That's definitely a risk, when selling. I think most sellers are avoiding the payment methods that allow chargeback.
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34 sats \ 1 reply \ @nym 17 Oct
What do you think is the most private form of payment on Robosats? I sort of get paralyzed at that point when deciding what to use.
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Thanks for the question. Bottom line, I would take a look at the fiat currency you want to buy btc with, and see what the current Robosats offers are in that currency. Just use whatever payment method they all are doing.
Most of the fiat payment methods are KYC. Like Strike, Revolut, CashApp, etc. Actually, that's only the ones I recognize. I just took a look at the current offers, here's some of the top payment methods:
20 - SEPA 16 - Revolut 12 - Strike 6 - Zelle 5 - Wise 1 - CashApp
There's a bunch of others - Monero, USDT, and a lot of others that I don't recognize. And some that say "other". Don't know what that means.
The trades for the Brazilian Real are in some payment methods that I haven't heard of (PIX? AirBnB gift cards?). So I have no idea about the privacy of those methods.
F2F is very uncommon and has risks of its own. Also I know on Bisq there's this elaborate protocol for trading with cash by mail. It's interesting to look at, if just out of curiosity - https://bisq.wiki/Cash_by_mail
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All P2P systems are the best option to get SATs without KYC. The big problem is that those who participate, fundamentally in this type of market are Bitcoiners, who are using this option to get SATs, but if we all want to get SATs and nobody wants to sell their SATs, then the problem begins.
It is likely that at some point, someone will have to give up their SATs and exchange it for shitty fiat, because we are not yet in Bitcoin standard, but it is not the most frequent. The biggest sales options are seen during the rise, but it is not an avalanche, because when you understand Bitcoin, you do not want to lose it.
Regarding Robosat specifically, I have the application but as soon as I open it, it tries to connect to Tor. Where I live the connection is very slow, so we use other VPN options, is there any configuration to remove the option to connect to Tor?
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Just to clarify - is it true that the internet is very slow there, and so Tor (being slower) is unusable? Or is it something else?
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34 sats \ 1 reply \ @BTCLNAT 18 Oct
The Internet is not that slow, it is that it is SUPER-ULTRA-SLOW. It is a total disgrace. I have been trying to use I2P, as a secure browser to use Robosats, but the configuration that is given does not recognize it, the version of I2P is 2.52, because I cannot get 2.7 in the Google Play store, my location is restricted. I will have to activate a VPN and download it later.
For us here, lnp2pbot works very well on Telegram and Mostro on Nostr.
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If you're using android, could you just run the apk for I2P?
https://files.i2p-projekt.de/2.7.0/app.apk
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No, I'm not aware of any options like that for the app.
It's strongly not recommended, but I guess you could do it via the desktop (or a regular browser on your phone), and just access robosats.com without tor. Here's the message that pops up when you do that:
"You are not using RoboSats privately To fully enable RoboSats and protect your data and privacy, use Tor Browser and visit the federation hosted Onion site or host your own app."
You'd really need to know what you're doing, in order to do this safely and privately. Use your own judgement, but be cautious.
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Thanks I'll try it.
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Excellent resource, thank you very much, it is very helpful for newbies and the uninitiated. I have used Robosats only on a couple of occasions and the truth is I love everything, from the robots to the details of taking care of privacy, such as only using it under TOR, although I usually move with low amounts below $100 and where I have found more buy and sell offers for both my local currency PEN and for USDT is in the LNP2PBOT of Telegram even with XMR
A couple of days ago I needed monero to pay for the vpn and it was as simple as placing a sell order. for , and after a few minutes someone took my order, everything was done normally and quickly, to later finish making the payment for the vpn
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Thanks for the comment. How does LNP2PBOT look in terms of privacy?
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34 sats \ 1 reply \ @flat24 17 Oct
How does LNP2PBOT look in terms of privacy?
To be honest it's almost the same as Robosats in my opinion it all depends on what payment method you use, when you exchange for Fiat. For example if you use your bank account you expose some data, or with Paypal your name also appears either to pay or receive a payment.
If you trade with USDT or another Crypto like Monero is where I consider a more private exchange occurs. IMO
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 17 Oct
Thanks, I was wondering this also.
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robosats is best in class
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If you're wanting to get started with Robosats and have any questions at all, feel free to ask! There are no dumb questions, p2p trading can be a little unsettling at first.
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💪🏾
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