LocalBitcoins will discontinue its service
Awwwww...<p>The original &quot;meet in person&quot; model was so good. All the bank transfers, paypal, etc. never made any sense.<p>Just a shout out to LocalBitcoins. When I was living in Argentina during the almost-hyperinflation of 2014 or so, I got <i>all</i> of my living cash in pesos and USD by selling BTC to local traders who I met on Localbitcoins.com. Usually I would meet them in a coffeeshop, have a coffee, wave my phone and transfer some BTC and they would hand me an envelope with $1000 USD and ARS$9000 that would cover my rent and food for the next month. The cost was +5% for the BTC-to-cash trade, but the exchange rate was &quot;blue&quot; meaning, at the time, one peso was officially worth $0.33 but the blue market had it trading at somewhere closer to $0.06... and trading for BTC got you the live blue rate. One kid I dealt with a lot had a wonderful business model. He was a math student at the university and opened an office buying and selling Bitcoin. When I asked him where he got all this USD <i>cash</i> which was almost impossible to find in Argentina, he explained:<p>People gave it to him. Argentines who got 20% of their paycheck in dollars, or who had dollars stuffed under their mattresses that they couldn&#x27;t get out of the country. They paid him 5% to move it out.<p>He took their cash and sold it to people like me - expats, tourists - for BTC, and sent the BTC to his partner in Miami, who changed it out to USD and put it into American bank accounts for them. So he got 5% on either side of the trade.<p>This was the moment, around 2013 or so, when I really believed BTC would be a unit of exchange that would break the artificial currencies around the world and serve as a leveler that would allow anyone with skill to work anywhere and go anywhere; it would demolish the old sclerotic monetary regimes.<p>Then it got regulated [edit: all its endpoints got pwnd], and Localbitcoins has not for a long time shown any P2P meetups for unregistered, silent trading-for-cash. That was its original purpose, and it served very well at the time.<p>In loving memory.