To achieve financial freedom and sovereignty through cryptocurrencies it is imperative to be able to buy and sell cryptocurrencies without being seen. As nearly all centralized exchanges follow AML/KYC regulations (which violate our right to do so) we must take a different approach.
DISCLAIMER: There is no affiliation between me and any service I recommend. I do so solely because I use them and I am happy with their product.
If you want to achieve true anonymity, you need to use cash. Cash is the king of anonymous transactions. This is also the reason why many countries put limits on cash transactions or require reports about them.
LocalBitcoins are no longer usable because they adapted KYC policy. The only other option I know about is to buy it from a friend or use an ATM. But be aware that:
It is nearly impossible to achieve full anonymity while trading fiat online. The reason is that digital fiat currencies are designed to be attributable. You always expose your identity to some degree because of that.
The highest level of privacy that I was able to achieve is by using (decentralized) peer-to-peer solutions.
Bisq is my favorite choice. It's fully decentralized and because of that, it is very private and censorship-resistant. They became DAO and therefore there is no single point that you can force to comply with KYC or extract information about transactions from. Bisq is an amazing piece of technology and has also very good documentation and you can read more about the technology there.
The limit on privacy is that you are exposing your identity to the peer you are trading with. The list of known limitations and risks is available in documentation as well.
The most convenient way for me is to combine the Bisq with Revolut card as sending money is really quick.
To buy, it works like this:
As both parties have significant (usually tens of percent of the trade volume) security deposits locked in the multisignature transaction there is a huge incentive to play fair and complete the trade.
There is also a dispute process for cases when one party fails to execute the trade.
The only problem I have is that those markets are small and the liquidity is simply not great. This results in the situation that the price in this market can be even 5% higher than on the centralized exchanges.
Trades in Bisq market
HodlHodl is very similar to Bisq but it works as a browser page. It may be easier for many people to use as you don't need to run specialized software.
They do not need to follow KYC/AML regulations as they do not hold any funds. I have asked them for a technical explanation of how they achieve that:
The downside of the HodlHodl is the fact that data are stored centrally. This creates a possibility that a 3rd party can have access to the data. Also, because of this centralization, the service can be shut down completely by some government agency. I see this as the price of having a convenient in-browser solution.
It is therefore important to use Tor or VPN to hide your metadata.
Thanks to those services you can reclaim your financial privacy. You can avoid AML and KYC regulations as they are highly immoral in their very nature.
Exhaustive guide about Bisq at Alza:
10 Jan 2021
- Removed Lamium.io (discontinued) and Lightning at HodlHodl