We shouldn’t wait for established exchanges to approve our coin for a large fee. We should set up the exchange ourselves. It could be a “meet in person” exchange, an exchange on the internet, or both. It could be a combination of localbitcoins.com and in-person meetups. Here are some of my ideas.
Regular meetups in places where a lot of community members are. Once a month, people could meet up to buy/sell MAID for the local currency or BTC. It could be combined with a marketing event.
Is it possible to set up a decentralized internet exchange for forum members? That’s probably a lot of work.
People who want to buy/sell MAID could post craigslist style ads giving their location. There could be a mapping function that is searchable so you could see on one map all of the buy/sell offers, all over the world. The trade would be done in person, with the internet as a facilitator.
As our community grows, this idea will start making more and more sense.
The brutal truth is, any exchange that we don’t control will probably let us down when we need it the most. Withdrawals will be halted, trading stopped, rules changing, the works. If we want to have a currency that embodies freedom, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be independent and have our own exchange.
Setting up an exchange is immensely complicated.
Resources are better spent elsewhere.
But it seems you mean something simpler.
Something like a forum where people can meet and exchange coins.
Maybe something like this? MaidSafeCoin Forum Escrows
The idea of a MAID exchange was started long ago in a time far away, but shall we say the project didnt end all that well…I would love to see the community take another go at it for sure!
A peer-to-peer community project is excellent, but not an exchange. People underestimate what it takes to start an exchange because they do not know what it takes to start an exchange.
But a simple (in terms of available functionality), truly decentralised exchange, and therefore untouchable by the hefty regulations and so on, is withinin reach I believe.
So, only trading of safecoin and safe tokens (no fiat pairs), for example.
But the transfer of token/coin ownership as well as efficient and scalable order matching is still areas to become more concrete. (I have been thinking about the technical details of it, but there are some things missing yet).
Efficient matching is the heart. Everything else is scaffolding.
Yes: Very important and detailed scaffolding. That must work perfectly.
But.
Matching.
Extreme hard doing fast when running on one computer.
You must care about everything: thread locality, cache locality, network stack, …
Decentralized: Never done before.
Global network is orders of magnitudes slower than CPU cache access.
Think about taking one step. Compared to reaching Pluto.
Such an exchange would not aim at the same capabilities, so it would not approach the problem in the same way and not try to solve the same problems.
Efficient and scalable order matching has to be interpreted within this context; It’s the same thing as with data, it’s the security and anonymity that people want with SAFENetwork, not extreme performance.
So, some very simplified solution, that actually performs a trade within a bearable time (that’s the scope of efficient here), is more or less within reach. Any resemblance to the performance that we are used to is out of reach.
Maybe we don’t even want that incredible performance…
Reliable extreme performance is necessary when doing algorithmic trading to be sure everything works as expected… If I just want to get some safecoin to buy me storage space/to buy something in the safe network I am not concerned about +/-0.5 % on price movement between placing an order and when it’s being executed … If it levels out long term anyway I don’t see why anyone would care anyway…
… Isn’t there even exchanges which lower certain aspects of the performance on purpose (https://iextrading.com) to level the playing field…?
Generally, that is considered a mistake. Batch auctions didn’t solve the problems in other markets either. They may solve one, cause another. It’s better to embrace markets crash sometimes.
Another idea. A liquidity pool for OMNI MAID. That might be easier to set up than an exchange. Take some code from an existing open source liquidity pool that everyone trusts and change it a little for our purposes.
Or run the liquidity pool by hand. If there isn’t much action, a volunteer could perform the actions/transfers that are tough to automate.
Oh yeah that’s right. Some parts would have to be done by hand then. It might be really clunky and slow too.
So a pool run by hand would require 2 steps:
Have a website that shows the existing liquidity pool parameters.
Anyone that wants to interact with the pool would have to do so through a volunteer. But this person would have to be trusted. It would not be a “trustless” liquidity pool.
Hmmm. This idea sounded really good in my head. Now I am not so sure.
