ELI5 Bitsquare (BISQ)

What is Bitsquare?

Bitsquare is the former name of a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX).

It was renamed to BISQ in March 2017 due to trademark-related issues.

In February 2014, a use announced a P2P exchange project on Bitcointalk forum. It was called BANK RUN! and aimed to be fully peer-to-peer and “impossible to be shut down” by a central authority. Another point in the BANK RUN! architecture was having fiat transactions completely separated from the exchange, so that banks did not know the transfer was a crypto-related settlement.

Four months later, in June 2014, BANK RUN! was renamed to Bitsquare.

The initial Bitsquare implementation used the Java programming language and used the BitcoinJ library for interfacing with the Bitcoin Core P2P network.

Years later Bitsquare was renamed to BISQ.

BISQ

Bitsquare / Bisq is a P2P app that allows cryptocurrencies and fiat money to be exchanged in a fully decentralized fashion.

The end goal of the Bisq project is to create a DAO – Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

Several previous attempts at creating DAO’s in several different niches have been unsuccessful. BISQ has been under development for more than 6 years now, making it one of the most mature DAO projects available.

BISQ DAO Basics Video: Colored Coins

No KYC Identity Verification

In BISQ, there is no central entity in charge of verifying who you are. No KYC is performed and transactions are anonymous for all practical purposes.

It’d be impossible to require members to send their ID’s anywhere, simply because there is no nationality or official entity to send any documents to.

Bisq does not run in any particular country, it is fully decentralized and runs around the globe.

Decentralized

Bisq is 100% decentralized!

As mentioned in the identity verification section, Bisq does not belong to any country or geographic location.

No central entity controls Bisq.

Secure

Bisq is developed in the Java programming language.

It is secure and peer reviewed through the open source methodology.

Bugs are reported in the open and fixes are made relatively quickly.

Privacy

Bisq runs on top of the Tor network.

Connections are 100% private and secure, or as secure as the Tor network itself.

Strong encryption is used in all stages of a transaction.

Open Source

The entire Bisq code base is published at Github.

Currently there are 256 developers watching the project, 2554 developers who’ve favorited (starred)  the project and 712 developers have forked it to test their own programming ideas on top of the main Bisq source code.

Simple

The Bisq app is really simple to use.

The interface is easy to understand and the operations are straightforward.

Here you can see a screenshot of the main trading screen:

References

Formerly Bitsquare / Current Official Bisq Website