I think we could definitely set up something like this as a community. My only issue is, how are we going to determine value or prices? The exchanges, for all their evils, still do a good job of determining the value of one coin from the next. Without them, I feel that prices will fluctuate and have a great variance from one person to the next. I might say that I want 10 ADA for my 1 STEEM, but the next person is charging 5 ADA.
I like the idea and I support it, but some sort of standard for determining the values of various coins would still need to be here (though I suppose we could always just pull averages from exchanges, but I feel like that partially defeats the purpose of this whole idea).
Hmm, good point. Maybe we would just need our own steem app with price board. Problem is that bitcoin transactions fees are quite high. It would be nice to convert directly to what you need.
I couldn't agree more. I know they are working on similar issues and solutions for them. The lightning network is one of them. If they get everything up and running, it should allow for direct, real-time exchanges between individuals, ignoring the exchanges.
My only real concern there is how we will determine how much something is worth. Most of our prices right now come from the exchanges, because there is a consensus of value. If we do away with the exchange, we somewhat do away with that concenses (aka the centralized element), which makes it harder to determine a consistent price.
If this can be done though, then a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange system with very little-to-no fees would be excellent!