Table of penalties
Penalties
Bisq has Rules in place to make the trading process as safe and convenient as possible for all parties involved, and it is important those rules are followed by users.
Penalties are a percentage of the trade amount, deducted from the offending peer's security deposit (and when needed, also from trade amount itself) and offered as a compensation to the other peer during the Dispute resolution process The actual penalty will be up to the values detailed below, depending on security deposit % and mediator's discretion.
100% penalties are for serious violations and will always imply losing the whole amount (trade + deposit).
If two or more penalties are caused by the buyer or seller the penalty amount will be greater of the amounts. Penalties are not cumulative.
Ideally, if good communication is established, peers can use trader chat to agree on a penalty amount to relay to their mediator.
Regardless of any penalty amount proposed the mediation proposal will always leave a peer with at least 5% of trade amount. This is to incentivize the peer to accept the mediation proposal rather than take the trade to arbitration where they will likely lose all of their deposit.
BTC Buyer or Seller issues:
| Buyer or Seller | |
|---|---|
| 100% | Fraud attempt: debiting of peer's account, code tampering |
| 50% | Attempting to get a peer to communicate outside of Bisq by displaying your contact info in the 'additional information' field on a cash by mail or face to face offer. |
| 25% | Not responding to a mediator within 48h |
| 25% | Bitcoin-related payment references (e; BTC, Bisq, Bitcoin...) |
| 25% | Contacting peer outside of Bisq without their previous consent and/or without reasonable need |
| 20% | Cancelling a trade |
| 20% | Requesting that payment be made from/to a different account name, without mediator's acknowledgement |
| 10% | Requiring personal data: ID, home address, etc. (Bisq should incentivize accounts that do not ask for any more info than necessary) |
| 10% | Abusing trading peer, mediator or arbitrator during dispute process |
BTC Buyer:
| Buyer | |
|---|---|
| 100% | Payment chargeback |
| 25% | Paying from an account with different name (as in "different person", while little variations, where it's clear payment comes for the correct person, are not penalized), seller is allowed to cancel the trade with no penalty |
| 20% | Payment is 72+ hours late |
| 15% | Payment is 48-72 hours late |
| 15% | Paying from an account with same name but different account number, seller is allowed to cancel the trade with no penalty |
| 10% | Payment is 24-48 hours late |
| 10% | Similar, but wrong, payment method (eg. SWIFT instead of SEPA, SEPA instant instead of Wise...) |
| 10% | Wrong payment amount: buyer has the option to correct the amount within the trade window, seller is allowed to cancel the trade with no penalty |
| 10% | Using unagreed payment reference. Any unagreed payment reference (also the trade ID) shares the same penalty. "Flowers" could be as bad as "services rendered" depending on every single case |
| 10% | Late payment because of low fee for altcoin tx; penalty can be reduced during mediation if buyer uses RBF or similar |
| 5% | Payment is up to 24 hours late |
BTC Seller:
| Seller | |
|---|---|
| 15% | BTC is released outside of trade window |
