Local Bitcoins Ad limits are not getting adjusted. Many of their limits are btc based. Some of them get adjusted when the price of BTC moves significantly. For a long time the minimum deposit to have an ad show up was 0.4 BTC. Its been adjusted down to 0.1 BTC and needs to go lower for many of the new traders. The ad limits Have not been adjusted. Each user can have 5 ads as a base. Then 1 new ad for every 1btc traded in a month. When BTC was $500 this was a resonable limit. Now that btc is over $5k it makes it difficult for many traders to maintain the trade volume to keep ads up. To buy and sell in one category it takes 4 ads if you use the trust system. Trusted ads are only shown to people that have been marked trusted. Many use it to offer trades with higher limits, and better prices to people they have verified as a good trade partner.
Pro-traders, a badge given to traders that have high feedback, and meet certain criteria have been asking for LBC to adjust these limits for months now.
When the Bitcoin price rises significantly, it attracts scammers, for multiple reasons. News gets around, and scammers like to get in early on stuff. It turns good people into scammers, they might be somewhat of a gambler, and when the price moves against them they do a charge back to get out of the loss. Scammers tend to create new accounts, and concentrate on a certain type of scam.
When Pro-traders (very unlikely to scam, but it still happens) can’t make ads in other categories, scammers fill in the gaps. Leaving people no choice but to think the offers are good.
Writing this and posting in multiple places is the best way I know to pressure them to fix it. The real pressure is monetary, but for them its unrealized as they continue to make good money. However they’re reputation is dropping, as the scammers move towards outweighing the good traders. People are moving over to other platforms, or trading outside the provided escrow which is how they make their money.
Other things they have done has caused a large number of support tickets, slowing things down for them. The iTunes category is full of scammers. They need a warning on the iTunes pages. There is a ***Money.Club scam that has been going around, and they lock people’s accounts when they try to send to a known moneyclub bitcoin address. There is a thread in the forums about it, but it should be a sticky or on the side. They’ve also changed things so that profiles cannot be viewed unless you have trade history with that user, or they have ads up. It also prevents people from using the block option if someone says they are a scammer in the forums. If support doesn’t get to the ticket for 3-5days, that people are left unable to do anything about it. They also need a sticky in the forum, or a popup terms to agree to so that people know The forums are not intended for trading, you need to use that ad section to get escrow protection. Multiple scammers post trade offers in the forum section.
LBC has put people in a Catch22 situation. Need more ads to do more volume, need more volume to have more ads.
An additional problem is the formula used, it is based on monthly volume. If a trader takes a week off for vacation the volume drops user snowkeld has suggested a different formula which takes annual volume in consideration.
Preferable to do 1 ad per 0.25/BTC + 5
Higher of past 30 days or 12 months/10
I agree with the suggestion, or something similar.
It is possible to manipulate the volume and some have offered to do that, two people could trade 0.5 one way, and 0.5 back the other way. Each one would get an extra ad and it would cost each person 0.005 btc (1% escrow fee). Currently about $33 each per month per ad.
LBC is one of the longest running p2p escrowed bitcoin trading platforms. Hope to see them do well.
if you check coin.dance you can see the trade volume for LBC, Pax, and Bisq. It is possible LBC realizes they are the biggest, similar to how some mining pools have become greater than 51% and have intentionally limited themselves, however i doubt this is the case.
Before LBC was
BitcoinTalk forum trading, no escrow, and
IRC #Bitcoin-OTC also no escrow (although you could use multi sig and use a 3rd person for escrow.
The web of trust is a very good idea.
Since then other platforms have popped up
Paxful (web) is the next most popular for P2P,
After that i’m not sure of the order of popularity between
Bitquick(web),
WallofCoins (web),
Mycelium (android only. Shame on Apple),
Bisq (Win/Mac/Linux), and
Bitrated (web).
Some other sites are doing p2p with alt-coins,
LitecoinLocal,
Liberalcoins, (BTC, LTC, XMR, Dash)
localmonero,
LocalEthereum,
localbitcoincash,