Monday, September 28, 2015

Shortening the time to dispute

Today we’re making a few changes to the dispute system to improve and simplify the trading experience on LocalBitcoins. From now onwards dispute times have been lowered to 12 hours for both buyers and sellers. Against new users with few trades, sellers can start a dispute after one hour.

Before today, buyers had to wait 24 hours before they could open up a dispute against an unresponsive seller and sellers had to wait 72 hours before they could open up a dispute against a buyer. This meant users had to sometimes wait several days before a resolution to their dispute could be made. Now, the process will be much faster.

We hope these changes will provide for more frictionless trading on LocalBitcoins and improve the liquidity of traders. We’ll be looking closely at the effects this change will have over the next few weeks, your comments are also greatly appreciated. Based on this we will evaluate further changes to the dispute process.

Happy trading!

– The LocalBitcoins team

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Trader features: Show user identification, Inline equation editing and watermarks

During the past month we've added three new features to help improve the experience buying and selling Bitcoins on our site.

Opt-in to show real name verifications



Traders can now opt-in to show real name verifications from the Edit Profile page. By opting in to this feature, when a buyer whom you have marked as ID verified opens up a trade with another trader you will be shown as a verifier in the security information box for the trade. This change is designed to improve the value of the Real Name Verification feature.

Once you've opted in, your name will be shown in trades of users whom you have verified along with when you have verified the user.

 Edit equations inline 



When you have several advertisements running it can be difficult to manage the pricing equations of each advertisement separately. Now you can edit equations inline in your dashboard making it easy and simple to change pricing equations. On the dashboard page where all of your advertisements are listed you only need to click on the equation (which is now underlined) to allow it to be edited. Once you've made your changes you can simply click the save button.

Watermarked images 


Images uploaded into a trade chat will now all be resized to 1200 by 1200 pixels in size and have a watermark applied to it. The watermark is a series of parallel lines containing the trade number as well as our logo, if you find a photo where the lines cross each other it means the photo has been previously submitted to a trade chat on LocalBitcoins. With this feature we hope to make it harder to re-use images that have been shared in trades.