HardenedSteel shut down, and it appears Reto has solidified their position as the sole Haveno network.

This means potentially one person or a tiny group is controlling the entire peer to peer Monero market.

Anyone can observe with publicly available information, that the way this works is that the seeder has control over who can be an arbitrator.  This is because you use their client, hooked to their seed server, to connect to other nodes.

Reto might be good, or bad.  We don’t know yet.

The bigger question is not who is in charge, but how good the behavior of the buyers will be.  Because Reto has in-person cash trades, where the seller locks up XMR.  That means that the buyer can pull a gun on seller and demand they approve the trade on their phone.  All you need is one incident, and this shit can hit the fan quick. 

 Btc only 😅 

 bisq has the same problem and nobody in bitcoin land even wants to do anything about it. I've never seen a bitcoin maxi use a real DEX 

 🙋 

 Sorry mate, but you don’t get to decide.  And neither do I.

The market does.  And right now it’s screaming so loud for Monero, it brought the Tor network to grinding crawl 

 What prevented someone from strong-arming victims before with LocalMonero? 

 The issue is not that this person will strong-arm people.  It’s that it’s one person for the government to make an example of, as opposed to multiple seed VPS the user picks from in the client 

 We need to somehow have a unified order book no matter what client a user chooses or the liquidity will be fractured and/or centralized

I don't think in-person cash trades were all that popular and the pulling a gun thing was always possible, not unique to Haveno, that's why you should meet somewhere in a public area if you do that

Cash-by-mail and payment apps seemed to be the most used by far iirc 

 If it's centralized, then it’s one person for the government to make an example of, as opposed to multiple seed VPS the user picks from in the client.  There's ways to do order books that have liquidity, look at BasicSwapDEX.
There should be at least two competing groups 

 I agree with you that's what I meant worded it badly 

 btw check your DMs 🤙 

 Robosats is not completely decentralized (it's federated) but at least different federations share the same order book, although the order marker needs to decide a priori which Federation will "host" and arbitrage the order.
I didn't know that bisq/haveno had this issue. I also don't know how arbitraging will work for Haveno. Bisq used timelocked multisig, but there's no such thing for Monero...