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Principles & honest trade-offs

Every claim we make about Bitcoin alignment, mapped to the exact implementation — including the parts we don't pretend away.

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
— Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, §1.

Peer-to-peer, no trusted third party

§1

Buyers pay sellers directly. We never custody funds and never sit in the middle of a payment.

How we implement it

  • Lightning trades use a two-invoice 98 / 2 split. The seller's 98% invoice settles directly to their self-custodial wallet; the 2% (or 1% for Pro) coordination fee settles to ours.
  • On-chain trades settle wallet-to-wallet. We only watch mempool.space and blockstream.info to mark an order paid.
  • Lightning addresses (name@domain) inherently resolve through the provider's domain (Alby, Wallet of Satoshi, your own LNbits, etc.). That resolution step is a protocol-level dependency on whichever provider you choose — funds still stay in your wallet. We disclose this on every LN address input.

Self-custody enforced

§2

Your keys, your sats. We can't move, freeze, or seize funds because we never hold them.

How we implement it

  • No platform wallet for user balances. There is nothing to confiscate.
  • Pro membership and featured listings are also paid Lightning-direct — same non-custodial path.
  • We never request nsec or any private key. Nostr signing is client-side via NIP-07 / NIP-46 only.

Open, permissionless participation

§5

No KYC, no allow-list, no jurisdiction filter. Subject to a published listings policy.

How we implement it

  • Sign up with email or wallet. No identity documents are ever requested or stored.
  • Listings can be removed only for documented policy violations (fraud, illegal goods, impersonation). Account-level bans are reserved for repeated fraud and recorded.
  • There is no kill-switch on the underlying ability to transact. Two users with Bitcoin wallets can always trade peer-to-peer, on or off this platform — removing a listing here does not affect that.

Incentive-aligned, no rent extraction

§6 · §8

Buyers pay 0%. Sellers pay 2% Free / 1% Pro. Pro is 2,100 sats / 30 days over Lightning.

How we implement it

  • No Stripe, no cards, no fiat checkout, no paid subscriptions outside Bitcoin rails.
  • No paid boosts or pay-to-rank. Pro membership unlocks exactly one featured listing slot — featured order rotates fairly among Pros.
  • Lapsed Pro silently downgrades to Free fees. No dunning, no card-on-file, no auto-charge.
  • §6 of the whitepaper concerns base-layer miner incentives. The 1% / 2% coordination fee covers matching, listing storage, and dispute surface — it is application-layer, not protocol-layer.

Cryptographic identity only

Identity

Identity = proving you control a Bitcoin or Nostr key. Never document-based KYC.

How we implement it

  • Wallet verification = sign a one-time message with your Bitcoin address.
  • Nostr verification = NIP-05 (and, on the roadmap, NIP-07 login + NIP-58 badges).
  • Verification score is advisory only. We never gate listing, buying, selling, messaging, or payments on any verification flag.

Out of scope for BitDoves Market

Some §5 concerns — social-layer content moderation, community guidelines, forum participation — belong to the social product, not the marketplace. Those are owned and answered there:

bitdovessocial.com
How funds moveWhitepaper alignment summaryPro pricingbitdoves.com