Sure, but in person transactions don't scale well and if you act as an in-person money changer for large amounts of money you are likely to be criminally charged for unlicensed banking or money laundering. Most of the ones I've seen limit exchanges to less than a few hundred dollars to avoid bringing down the hammer on them. (It can technically still be illegal to exchange small amounts, but if the amounts are small authorities are less likely to bother.)
They work for hobbyists messing around with crypto and people who want to buy small amounts of droogs on black/grey markets, but aren't going to allow crypto to be mass adopted.
P2P marketplaces can record an exchange, sure, but how do you actually send or receive large volumes of Euros, Pounds Sterling, or Dollars without casting a "summon police" spell?
If they don't want to do anything that looks like laundering, a peer-to-peer exchange would be another easy way to convert the sanctioned bitcoins to USD.
> it's easy enough to find someone to meet in person and exchange crypto for $1-10k cash a few % below the market rate. Some will even pay above market rate if you can do $100k+
In case anyone is wondering, this is money laundering, and if you wind up with the wrong person on the other side, getting arrested and charged is among the better outcomes.
Is it that easy to trade $50,000 of a cryptocurrency for regular currency without leaving an ugly papertrail? I guess theoretically you can have a clean accomplice that does it for you on the regulated exchanges and hands you the cash, but I'm not sure how well that works for evading LE.
Well yes but you are assuming you can find a buyer who is willing to do a straight bank transfer rather than using an exchange. And most people much prefer to use the exchanges. Especially if they are buying drugs with the bitcoins; if they did a bank transfer to a person selling drugs, they could have just used that payment method in the first place.
It you live in a big city, it's easy enough to find someone to meet in person and exchange crypto for $1-10k cash a few % below the market rate. Some will even pay above market rate if you can do $100k+.
It's not true, though. The difficulty is getting USD, Euros, or Yen out of exchanges, not getting BTC into them. And while almost every exchange will happily take your BTC, very, very few will send you dollars without thorough vetting. You normally need a bank account in the country the exchange operates in, for example.
It's true that you'd be able to use a service like localbitcoins to sell your coins, but in this hypothetical future, exchanges are using an agreed-upon protocol to identify and blacklist mixed coins. Even if it's not fully standardized, it's easy to check whether a coin has been tumbled through any mixer of sufficient size. So I'm not sure anybody on localbitcoins would be willing to pay the same prices for these.
FYI most reputable Bitcoin exchanges are compliant with "anti-money laundering" regulations ("AML") and require valid identification on record for anyone making transactions of significant size. You'd have to use a shady online btc brokerage or exchange the btc in local cash-based deals if you want to circumvent the international AML laws.
Yeah, there's one less than 5 minutes from my flat, and I live a little outside of the centre. I've used crypto very little in recent years, so not a lot of personal experience to share, but I know some people who use them (or just the P2P market places of sites like Binance).
I suspect the ATMs will give you a worse exchange rate than what you'd get on a P2P exchange online.
If you trade in and out for cash, in person with a counterparty, from a self-hosted wallet that you never use to send or receive from any other wallet that's connected to an exchange... then yes. The use case for this is mainly moving money over borders.
For trading them into 'real' currency you would usually use an exchange, yes. Coinbase (IIRC) simplifies things for merchants by accepting bitcoin and giving them the currency they want.
But for pure bitcoin transactions, no, you can run all the stuff yourself, maintain your own wallet and transact with anyone you like, all without needing anything other than functional bitcoin client software. You need to trust the bitcoin network as a whole, but not any individual authorities.
I'm really not a fan of BTC, personally, but I have looked into it quite a lot...
You can do the same thing with USD. It's called money laundering, and was not invented by the Bitcoin community. Granted, for the time being it's a lot easier to do with Bitcoin, but any kind of mass market adoption would surely change this.
But to buy bitcoin on an exchange, even if it doesn't have KYC laws, you'd need to have the money in a bank account first to do the wire transfer to fund your crypto exchange account. The problem of money laundering is how do you get it into the bank account in the first place. What I'm saying is that you'd have to do actual cash transactions, meaning giving someone paper money and getting bitcoin into your wallet. That's quite a problem, especially as the numbers get larger.
They work for hobbyists messing around with crypto and people who want to buy small amounts of droogs on black/grey markets, but aren't going to allow crypto to be mass adopted.
P2P marketplaces can record an exchange, sure, but how do you actually send or receive large volumes of Euros, Pounds Sterling, or Dollars without casting a "summon police" spell?
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