Down the P2P RoboSats Rabbit Hole
Will Schoellkopf is the author of “Bitcoin Girl Save the World” and “The Bitcoin Dog.” You can subscribe to his newsletter for a 21% Off merch promo code at realBitcoinDog.com.
RoboSats, the ultimate p2p exchange that doesn’t require verification, has received some upgrades since the last time I used it! It’s my go-to source for non-KYC p2p Bitcoin. Join me on my journey down the RoboSats rabbit hole as I welcome you to my new Robo Garage!
Author’s Note: This is a real-world RoboSats example that isn’t edited to exclude missteps or bumps in the road on my quest to privately buy bitcoin. If you make it to the end, you will bear witness to the game theory of truly trading Bitcoin peer-to-peer.
First, connect to Tor.
Robosats.com will take you to the appropriate .onion address.
Generate a token that is private just for your order, and meet your new robot! See? Buying Bitcoin peer-to-peer doesn’t have to be scary!
A fancy new feature makes it super easy to add more robots to my garage! RoboSat’s philosophy is “one robot identity per order” for enhanced privacy, and now managing multiple robots (orders) is super easy!
I’ve sorted the Order Book by top Premiums. It looks like people selling Bitcoin really want to receive Euros via Revolut, and Buyers are willing to pay a 12% premium at an exchange rate over $30k USD/BTC to pay for Bitcoin with an Amazon gift card!!
Don’t forget to “Enable Telegram Notifications” for your robot! It’s a great way to keep on top of your offers while you’re away from your Tor browser!
On Robosats, I find that selling an Amazon gift card is a great way to buy non-KYC Bitcoin. I can buy a gift card from a grocery store with cash, and the seller can use my gift card code to buy almost anything they would want. This is a great way to exchange value privately over the internet! 8% seems to be the standard premium for buying Bitcoin with an Amazon gift card. It’s not quite as good as cash for them, which is why they get an 8% premium for their trouble.
Next we make a “bond.” This is to ensure we aren’t wasting the seller’s time. It’ll come back to us after we cancel or after the order is processed.
Many lightning wallets work with RoboSats. Not listed here is Cash App, which also works!
With the bond paid, now we wait 24 hours for the order to expire and 3 hours to respond when a maker takes the order. The premium rank is only 40% so I am going to pay half as much premium, which is great for me as the buyer! It’s also half as likely for my order to be filled, since over half the orders will pay out more than mine!
Checking the Order Book, we can see our order. And of course all the other orders will pay out much more to the seller than ours!
I bought two $100 Amazon gift cards so I could have two robots in my robot garage, and see if one premium could get picked before another! So I have now created an order for my second robot. RoboSats supports decimal premiums, so 6.9% it is! Robosats gets its Bitcoin Exchange Rate calculation from blockchain.info and yadio.io, which are publicly available and easily verifiable by anyone at any time, so I don’t need to worry at all about a “spread” in the exchange rate. It really is just a matter of what percentage premium I’d like to pay. At a 6.9% premium the premium rank is 50%, so it’s even better for me as the buyer, but now sellers have 50% more orders to pick from which are better than mine!
Can you spot my two orders?
No takers for my 6.9% premium order while I slept. 15 hours left, so instead of letting it expire I will cancel the order, and delete the robot. No need to re-use this identity!
My bond’s sats were now released to my lightning wallet! Very cool!!
Now I’ll add a brand new robot to my garage!
So now I have a new order. Notice that while it’s still a $100 order, the bond amount required has dropped in sats from 10,085 to 9,970 sats. This is because the price of BTC/USD has gone down!
Alright so now I’m the top two Amazon gift card orders, and the highest premium for USD. We’ll see what happens!
Uh oh! I need to delete my 8% robot and create a fourth robot, since competition is heating up!
Bidding War!! NauralWebsite106 and I are both online and active!! And I’ve got a 0.1% higher premium than him at 12.1%, putting me at the top of the chart! I’ve also left my 8.1% premium order.
For my 12.1% premium robot, my order premium rank is 0% because I am the highest paying out order for sellers to take!
When it comes to RoboSats, patience is a virtue. This is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) miracle. It empowers us with the chance to buy Bitcoin p2p with no-KYC in total privacy over Tor. A true digital e-cash! However, it’s a free market and there needs to be someone on the other side of the trade who is willing to accept your offer. So, after disregarding patience as a virtue, I decided to sweeten the deal. I canceled both orders to combine them into a single $200 Amazon gift card order with a 15% premium!
Of course, with a new robot!
Look who’s Robot King of the Order Book with a 15% premium! Nifty depth chart on the right, too! The chart shows how bitcoin bid and ask overlap. In other words, where there’s overlap, there’s opportunity for profitable arbitrage! If you are a high roller with access to many different payment methods, you can take advantage of this opportunity and pocket the differences in premiums!
You see, RoboSats is robust enough to have buyers and sellers online all the time, but they don’t just settle for the highest premium orders. However, if an order is sweet enough, that will get them to pull the trigger! Fortunately, once I sweetened my order to a $200 Amazon gift card with a 15% premium, I found a Bitcoin seller right away! In the encrypted chat, they explained how the 15% premium was what enticed them to want to make the trade, since there’s only so much they can use the Amazon gift card for. Of course, they shared my enthusiasm for Robosats. “RS for the win!”
Even if buyers and sellers are strangers on the internet, or maybe even a robot Bitcoin Dog, they can still be nice and friendly. I rate my experience five stars!
And, of course, the sats I used for the bond are right back in my lightning wallet!
Learn more at https://learn.robosats.com/ and try it out today! This review showcases the plain realities of buying bitcoin p2p, where the liquidity isn’t like your typical, large, anti-privacy exchange. Instead of being put off by these plain realities, try adjusting your expectations when stacking privately p2p, as articulated in this article!
Will Schoellkopf is author of “Bitcoin Girl Save the World“, “The Bitcoin Dog: Following The Scent To The Bitcoin C++ Source Code,” and host of the Bitcoin podcast “It’s So Early!”. Will publishes a weekly newsletter featuring his favorite Bitcoin Tweets of the week! He is published in print at Bitcoin Magazine and Citadel21, and online at Satoshi’s Journal. Follow him on Twitter @realBitcoinDog, or email will@realbitcoindog.com
