Comment by noduerme
4 hours ago
Most of the major Bitcoin spikes and leveling-up of the price since 2012 have preceded or corresponded with governments tightening controls, and people using BTC they owned or buying it to evacuate capital to more lightly regulated countries. That's also why there hasn't been a Bitcoin rush for awhile, imho... it's no longer very useful for that, now that all the entrance and exit nodes are monitored. Gold is a bit hard to move, but this article may be underselling to what extent the recent spike in gold prices is attributable to demand for that kind of liquidity. The cross-border, anonymous kind.
The demise of Localbitcoins actual local meetups and trading for cash was the end of a significant way to move money out of regimes that people suspected were going to take it from them.
Localbitcoin is dead but there are still venues to trade bitcoin/crypto for cash. They have mostly moved to p2p on facebook and discord.
There are a few platforms that facilitate personal transactions using stuff like Venmo and Zelle but I suspect most of the people who are continuously selling lots of coins are probably silk road type vendors so I have to imagine it's just a great way to get your Venmo account on the feds radar.
Using Venmo or Zelle obviates the reason for using Bitcoin to move money from one country to another, which is that you don't want the transfer to be traced, and you may or may not have access to the banking system where you're going (eg the enormous flood of Bitcoin out of China and Hong Kong during the crackdown). Venmo and Zelle are American banks that just add a new type of KYC endpoint. From there, it's easy to see the whole blockchain back to where you acquired it.
Localbitcoins facilitated a cash exchange that was extremely useful for people seeking to move money out of repressive regimes and convert it into local currency they could live on.
To your point, that money didn't have to be acquired on Silk Road or something... I used to get paid for work in BTC, and used it to pay rent for a couple years in Argentina by selling it to a dude I'd meet once a month at a Starbucks.
You don't have to be a silk road vendor. You just have to be selling and buying both, then you can make money on the spread, which can be several percent in P2P markets.
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