8 basic facts about RoboSats and Bisq

Crypto regulation is gonna be tightened very soon in my country. This week, Gemini sent an email announcement to state that we users would have to declare the full name and country of residence of the party involved whenever we receive crypto from his/her wallet. If we fail to reveal the identity, we would be disallowed to withdraw our money. This got me interested to find out more about RoboSats and Bisq - no harm knowing more about the options out there so that I could pivot accordingly in the future when I feel stifled by the regulations.

1. RoboSats and Bisq are platforms where you can get your sats without having to KYC.

2. RoboSats is short for Robotic Satoshis. It is named as such because it allows you to generate a robotic avatar when exchanging your sats.

3. The difference between them is that RoboSats employs the Lightning Network whereas Bisq facilitates only on-chain Bitcoin payments. So, you can swap Lightning Network BTC to on-chain BTC and vice versa on RoboSats.

4. Another difference is that RoboSats requires you to use it with the Tor browser while you install Bisq which is a desktop application that has an in-built payment protocol.

5. Since RoboSats uses the Lightning Network, it has a 3 million sat limit to ensure that transactions can go through completely.

6. Both platforms require you to have BTC first before you can buy BTC - as an assurance that you won’t waste other users’ time with empty promises.

7. Many users use platforms like Strike, Revolut, CashApp and even PayPal to accept payments but if you are particular about your privacy, cash by mail orders, Amazon gift cards or even cash in person would be your best bet.

8. Bisq is non-custodial and decentralised, which makes it harder to be shut down. RoboSats could be shut down if the sole operator were arrested for whatever reason.

Are you using these two non-KYC marketplaces? Anything else that I should know?