Bisq has rules in place to make the trading process as safe and convenient as possible for all parties involved, and it is important those rules are followed by users.
Penalties are a percentage of the trade amount, deducted from the offending peer's security deposit and offered as a compensation to the other peer during the dispute resolution process.
The actual penalty will be up to the values detailed below, depending on security deposit % and mediator's discretion, except for 100% penalties, that refer to serious violations and will always imply losing the whole amount (trade + deposit).
Alternatively, if good communication is established, peers can use trader chat to agree on a penalty amount to relay to their mediator.
Buyer or Seller | |
---|---|
100% | Fraud attempt: debiting of peer's account, code tampering |
25% | Not responding to a mediator within 48h |
20% | Cancelling a trade |
20% | Requesting that payment be made from/to a different account name, without mediator's acknowledgement |
10% | Requiring personal data: ID, home address, etc. (Bisq should incentivize accounts that do not ask for any more info than necessary) |
Buyer | |
---|---|
100% | Payment chargeback |
25% | Bitcoin-related payment references (eg. BTC, Bisq, Bitcoin...) |
25% | Paying from an account with a different name (Name Surname instead of Surname Name, and/or slight variations are allowed, where they do not generate ambiguity), seller is allowed to cancel the trade with no penalty |
20% | Payment is 72+ hours late |
15% | Payment is 48-72 hours late |
15% | Paying from an account with same name but different account number, seller is allowed to cancel the trade with no penalty |
10% | Payment is 24-48 hours late |
10% | Similar, but wrong, payment method (eg. SWIFT instead of SEPA, SEPA instant instead of Wise...) |
10% | Wrong payment amount: buyer has the option to correct the amount within the trade window, seller is allowed to cancel the trade with no penalty |
10% | Using unagreed payment reference |
10% | Late payment because of low fee for altcoin tx; penalty can be reduced during mediation if buyer uses RBF or similar |
5% | Payment is up to 24 hours late |
Seller | |
---|---|
15% | BTC is released outside of trade window |
If an issue was not reported, how do you know it's really a bug? There was the same penalty as for delaying a payment because otherwise traders are incentivized to say that something (i.e. confirm payment button) failed. If they ask for help once mediation starts, then is too late, as the trade is already delayed, even if the main factor for the delay was really a bug.
Although I agree penalties should be price agnostic, future trading is a violation on how Bisq works, so it should stay as a 100% penalty:
Option trading was almost the only reason to increase security deposits. Security deposits are suggested according to future trading risk (through volatility) and mediators are alerted if there was a chance of future trading. It needs to be crystal clear that Bisq should not be used as a future trading platform.
About using different penalties with regards to timescales in case of late buyers/sellers:
First of all, paying (as buyer) or responding to mediator (as seller) doesn't mean that the other part will be able to end the trade just after: they can delay accepting the mediation for many days.
Then, there's different payment methods: A buyer who is delayed less than 24h using SEPA means that it took almost 7 days to start the payment.
This penalty is highly case dependant, but I don't see how trying to describe every possible case is doing any good. It's not possible to cover all possible cases with that timescale, while it brings back complexity to the table, where the same issue is repeated.
If you want to keep mediations consistent between different mediators, just peer review this and other edgy cases regularly.
If this time dependant timescale is kept, at least change "BTC is released outside of trade window" for "BTC are not released at the end of trade window".
The issue I found with using different accounts is that mediators can't require tamper evident proof about it, so I think it's better that any change in that sense goes through mediation.
A possible option to avoid opening mediation is to make users sign a message with the changes in a trading protocol with Ctrl+G, but this tool is not friendly enough for everyone's use.
All in all, as not being able to proof what is being said on a chat is not a common issue and mediators seems to be ok with it, not reporting small changes (I consider big, as troublesome, a different name for buyer or seller) on the trade contract to mediator seems ok to me, but the table, as I see it now, it's not clear as it has the same cause for penalty (using an incorrect name) for buyer and buyer/seller.