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What's the meaning of Haveno?
Haveno is an Esperanto word that means 'harbour' or 'port'.
Pronunciation:
PA(key): /haˈveno/ Hyphenation: ha‧ve‧no
Why a new platform? What are the key differences compared to Bisq
Haveno is a fork of Bisq and share some of its strengths, like:
- Censorship resistant thanks to the absence of a central server (P2P network).
- Non custodial. The user has the total control of their wallet.
- Built on Tor.
But Haveno brings several improvements over Bisq:
Haveno is privacy-focused
Bisq doesn't offer strong privacy to its users and have had multiple problems, which resulted in their user's privacy being compromise.
- Because of Bitcoin's lack of fungibility and privacy proprieties, every transaction and address on the BTC blockchain are easily traceable. Anybody can check who a BTC user transacted to and the amount of the transaction. This design flaw has allowed and empowered blockchain surveillance companies, which make Bitcoin's blockchain a surveillance paradise and a privacy nightmare.
- It's trivial to identify on the Bitcoin blockchain which transactions come from a Bisq exchange. This compromises the privacy of Bisq's traders.
- The BSQ token is a huge privacy concern, when used to pay transaction fees on Bisq, it makes possible to link a transaction with a specific Bisq user.
- A recent paper demonstrated that it's possible to track Bisq contributors participating to the DAO and deanonymize them.
- Bisq's trade history is public and it's posted along details like dates and traded amounts.
- We found and disclosed a very bad vulnerability in Bisq, which until its discovery had allowed malicious actors to harvest payment info like bank accounts, names and potentially home addresses of Bisq users.
Haveno has no token and it's based on Monero, thus taking advantage of its privacy-preserving technologies, resolving the problems mentioned above simply by design or by choice. We think the privacy of our users is the priority.
Haveno is simpler
Bisq has a very complex and clunky interface, which limits its ability to reach non technical users. As a result, Bisq is mostly used by power users.
One of our key goals is to offer a simple and smooth user experience, where the user can go from wanting to trade to begin the trade in few minutes.
Haveno is cheaper
Bisq is based on Bitcoin and inherits its historically high transaction fees, which will have to be added to the trade fee of the platform.
Average Bitcoin transaction fee: ~$20 Average Monero transaction fee: ~$0.003
Haveno is based on Monero allowing traders to take advantage of the very low transaction fees, resulting in more convenient trades, especially for low amounts.
Haveno is faster
Because of the hard capped block size in Bitcoin, blocks are often full. To have a transaction confirmed in a reasonable time, the user needs to pay astronomical transaction fees to be able to prioritize their transaction and be included in a block. Bisq doesn't offer the possibility to pay higher fees for Bitcoin transactions, resulting in users having to wait hours (in some cases even more than 24 hours) to see their transaction confirmed and begin the trade.
Haveno is based on Monero, which beside having much lower transaction fees (as we mentioned in the previous chapter) it has a dynamic block-size, which makes it more scalable and flexible than Bitcoin.
What are the differences in the trade protocol
A draft of the lates trade protocol candidate for Haveno is in docs/trade-protocol.md
Bisq recently adopted a protocol based on a 2/2 multisignature, while Haveno will use their previous protocol: 2/3 multisignature. In a 2/3 multisignature trade, each trader owns one key, this key will be paired with the key of the other trader and will be used to unlock funds and deposits. It's a 2 of 3 (2/3) protocol because you need only two out of three keys to move funds from the multisignature wallet.
If everything goes fine, the two traders will use their keys to complete the transfer process. If something goes wrong, one of the two parties won't use their key to complete the transaction, this is where the arbitrator comes to action.
Arbitrators are inherited from Bisq's 2/3 protocol. They are a trusted role and have the duty of releasing the funds to one of the two parties in case of a conflict. To do so, they use the third key of the 2/3 multisig protocol.
Using arbitrators has drawbacks:
- The arbitrator owns a key, so they could potentially collude with a trader and use their key to send arbitrary transactions
- Arbitrators could be hacked and their key stolen
These issues are solved by employing few and trusted members of the Monero community with strong operation security knowledge, that will act their role anonymously.
UX differences from Bisq
Haveno aims to have a much better user experience than Bisq, which suffers of an overcomplicated user interface and an extremely resource-intensive platform, which cannot be even opened on some hardware. Haveno aims to be easy to use and light on the user's system.
Will there be an Haveno token like Bisq has BSQ?
No. The BSQ token is meant to be the key factor of Bisq's DAO. We won't implement Bisq's DAO and the trades on the platform are based on multisignature transactions. No need for a token.
Why no DAO?
Bisq's DAO is an interesting and innovative governance mechanism, but currently seems to be an unnecessary overcomplication that takes a lot of resources to maintain. Bisq contributors earn BSQ tokens according to how much they contribute to Bisq and the roles they cover inside the project. More BSQ a person has earned, more their vote count when it comes to vote (for releasing rewards, protocol changes, etc).
One of the problems is that there seems to be no expiring date for roles or maximum amount of roles that a contributor can cover. As a result, long term Bisq contributors (who already cover multiple roles) will always gain more BSQ than a newcomer and unless they decide on their own to leave some roles, there is no way for a new contributor to have as much voting power as a veteran Bisq contributor. The new contributor could make such large contributions that would earn them a huge amount of BSQ, but even in that case the release of BSQ is voted with the mechanism we mentioned earlier, so elder Bisq contributors (with more voting power) could vote against releasing rewards to the newcomer if they feel their power threatened.
Furthermore, BSQ tokens can also be bought. Acquired BSQ has less "voting power" than earned BSQ, but less doesn't mean 'none'. A wealthy and malicious attacker could buy the amount of BSQ necessary to influence a vote. This is a major hole for a decentralized governance system.
These are all worst case scenarios and there doesn't seem to be any proof that something along these lines has ever happened, but it doesn't mean that won't happen in the future.