FRANCIS on Nostr: Some shower thoughts, thinking about what to build on Nostr as someone who runs a ...

Some shower thoughts, thinking about what to build on Nostr as someone who runs a centralized OTC app.

When selling Bitcoin on a P2P marketplace, the seller is at high risk of these kinds of scams especially of the buyer is using a non-cash payment (paypal, bank transfer, fiat payment apps). Sellers often get super rekt by the scams mentionned above. P2P or OTC bitcoin sellers will either charges a big premium as insurance, or does their own KYC (often either ultra invasive or hopelessly inadequate). Fraudulent buyers hurt the UX of P2P marketplaces, and ironically the fraud detection tools of centralized exchanges, whether KYC or pattern analysis, would be the solution.

As a seller of Bitcoin, the only thing you really need to know about the buyer is "will this guy fuck me over and will the fiat be clawed back". As a buyer, you only want to give the minimum information possible, but enough that the seller will trust you and not charge you exhorbitant fees and put you through outrageous verification processes to make sure you're not a scammer.

Bull Bitcoin's low-hanging fruit value proposition for Nostr: we have sophisticated fraud detection and KYC tools with varying degrees of due dilligence. Most of our tools are minimally privacy intrusive. The end result is that we have can have an extremely high degree of certainty that a given user "is not scammer", and a high degree of certainty that a user is "likely not a scammer". Our users already obtain a kind of "trust score" internally, which basically means they are not likely to do a chargeback, are not frausters stealing someone's bank account or a con artist performing some man-in-the-middle scam.

So it seems like doing NIP-05 verifications, or some variation, giving broad labels (risk score very low, risk score low) based on internal that we have would be useful for people that want to show good reputation on Nostr-based marketplaces. And we could do this well. Bull Bitcoin users that are whitelisted by us could then "port" the reputation they have with us to a P2P exchange.

Then again, I really don't want to be "the KYC guy" on Nostr. I hate the fact that KYC is one of our expertise (even if a lot of what we do is minimally invasive). I also don't want to be liable for "endorsing" people that aren't scamming Bull Bitcoin, but that may scam others.

I wanna do something fun on Nostr, not replicate something that sucks from legacy Fiat-Bitcoin world. But there is demand for it and we're good at it.

Final thought: just because you can, and just because people want, doesn't mean you should.