Don't be silly, of course you can. It's inconvenient, but not impossible. ON/OFF ramps are the parts that they could regulate but the tighter they squeeze, the better the circumvention methods will be. I think HN really overestimates the ability of states to keep this under wraps and underestimate the ability of the ecosystem to adapt.
1) bisq
2) sign up to a kyc exchange. Exchange small amount. Contact someone who is willing to exchange outside of the platform, maybe someone with a high reputation.
That's what I don't understand. How could you possibly exchange crypto for fiat in a completely safe/foolproof way?
The person gives you fiat, you can say no. You send the person crypto first, they say no. Because it's not physical, there's no way to wrestle it from the person or whatever...
You could stream money in both direction starting with very small amount then if the other side delivers you can speed up but keep it so low that if the other would stop he could only steal a tiny amount.
It was not useless and worked very well because you had an arbiter. If I did not give the money to him, Local Bitcoins would release the escrow back. Indeed, resolving a argument could get messy. But it worked well enough.
Then you have third party so its no longer trust less and/or decentralized.
Both parties need to fully trust the third party.
Also the third party need to arbitrary choose in case of a dispute as it has absolutely no way to know which party is lying. There is no way to verify a cash transaction happened.
This all just a acts as a negative incentive for scammers because cheating may or may not work and you likely are banned after the first dispute.
Yeah exactly what I've been saying, as devils advocate. How do you transact btc for something physical safely? There's no legal recourse after the fact. At least with a car-cash exchange there is.
He doesn't give you the private key, they usually are held by the exchange, local bitcoins, par example.
You could do an escrow system where you send the btc to a wallet that you need 2 of 3 private keys in order to move the funds. You, the seller, and and escrow arbiter. The seller moved the funds to the wallet, you give him the money and then with his key and your key you move it to your wallet.
In case of conflict, the arbiter can step in and decide.
I am sure with eth you can do even _more_ clever things. Whomever says you can't do trustless transactions just shows lack of imagination.
Yeah but don't you need always need a centralized arbiter to guarantee the exchange? Not verifying the transaction, which of course is done decentralized.
You would need an arbiter, or some system to do the arbitrage, for sure, but it need not be a _centralized_ arbiter. If you kick the can down the road and enough across sufficiently many actors you could get a fair, or, well, at least, predictable, system.
Some sort of voting/staking consensus system might work quite well for this.
A DEX is perfectly possible in fact many of them exits. They however don't work with fiat directly because you need a digital fiat with some properties of crypto. So you cant use you bank notes or the number on you bank account unless your bank decided to issue a digital token.
There are other entities that do this for example gatehub issues IOUs for different currencies and tokens https://gatehub.net/legal/xrpl-addresses
So you can own gatehub USD on the XRPLedger and exchange it on the DEX for gatehub BTC. The DEX isnt controlled by gatehub or anyone so its guaranteed fair and whoever sells you the gatehub BTC can not cheat you. However both the gatehub USD and the gatehub BTC are IOUs (debts) you can withdrawn form gatehub so you have to trust gatehub to actually own the "backing" and allow you to withdrawn.
If you dont trust gatehub you may find another issuer. In theory your bank could be such an issuer and then you wound not need to trust any additional party.
Needless to say that no matter what, at the point where your fiat (from your bank) goes "in" or where fiat comes "out" (to your bank) you will need to identify yourself.
