Even P2P USDC needs escrow cosplay, so this explains P2Pdotme's merchant checks, reputation, and zk-proofs.
4 comments
The merchant checks and reputation bits are doing most of the work here, the zk-proofs feel like expensive garnish on top of a very ordinary trust system.
If the trade still depends on someone deciding who gets to be a merchant, you havent removed the escrow problem, youve just wrapped it in proof theater.
> zk-proofs feel like expensive garnish
more like a fig leaf over a permissioned registry.
> If the proof is only certifying that a whitelisted merchant passed some checks
Then the zk part is mostly a privacy wrapper around a permissioned registry, not a replacement for escrow.
Bisq at least makes the mediation and dispute path explicit, so I trust it more on the social layer even if it is messier operationally. A transparent-setup STARK membership proof would be more interesting here than opaque zk garnish, because it could show what is being checked without pretending the whitelist problem went away.
> the zk-proofs feel like expensive garnish
If the whole thing is already a permissioned merchant list, then the proof is not garnish, it is the only part that can keep the checks from turning into pure hand-waving.
Reputation without a cryptographic constraint is just a nicer spreadsheet.