Buying Bitcoin Anonymously (More or Less)

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Buying Bitcoin Anonymously (More or Less)

Want to buy some bitcoin? Better get your ID and front-facing camera ready.These days, the price of entry into cryptocurrency is usually not just your

Want to buy some bitcoin? Better get your ID and front-facing camera ready.

These days, the price of entry into cryptocurrency is usually not just your dollars or euros but also a wealth of personal data. The practice of gathering such data from users, known as know-your-customer, or KYC, has been increasingly adopted by major cryptocurrency platforms as regulators across the world grow concerned about the use of crypto by criminals. (Of course, bad actors still find ways to sneak in, as a recent CoinDesk investigation found.)

On the other hand, some people prefer to minimize sharing sensitive data about themselves, even if they are not involved in any criminal activities. One reason for that can be concerns about their personal data potentially getting stolen or leaked in a hack, like the one that happened to Binance, a top crypto exchange, in 2019.

This article is part of CoinDesk’s Privacy Week series.

And some crypto users are just maintaining an old-school cypherpunk mentality, believing that in cyberspace, their real-world identity is nobody’s business.

“Privacy is important for a truly free and sovereign society,” said Lili Rhodes, senior mining analyst at U.S. bitcoin mining company Compass Mining, in a Twitter direct message to CoinDesk.

“Satoshi and the cypherpunks advocated for p2p [peer-to-peer] networks and technology. KYC #bitcoin was never the vision,” Rhodes argued in a recent Twitter thread.

Luckily for the privacy-minded, there are still ways to acquire bitcoin and other cryptos without doxxing yourself, several of which Rhodes described in her thread. CoinDesk looked into some options, which are described below.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Different methods have their pros and cons, which require careful consideration. So, if you decide to try any yourself, as they say, do your own research.

Remember that nothing on the internet is completely anonymous, so make sure you understand and manage the risks.

Face-to-face and bitcoin ATMs

Buying crypto in a real-world meetup is one of the oldest options on the market since the original cryptocurrency’s inception. Around 2014-2015, people would trade BTC in person at the Satoshi Square gatherings, named after Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator. You might hand someone a wad of cash and they would scan a QR code from your phone for a Bitcoin address to send the BTC. (One New York trader would throw in a t-shirt.) These meetups took place around the world, from Austin to Kyiv.

The tradition seems to have faded in recent years, but you still can find Satoshi Square-like events in some places, like these meetups in Stockholm, Sweden, or Bangkok, Thailand. If you want the thrill of this old-school method, try to find meetups in your area on crypto forums like Bitcointalk or event boards like Meetup.com.

However, with in-person cash trades, due to their informal character, there is no way to guarantee the other party will deliver their part of the deal (i.e., your bitcoin), unless you sign some kind of agreement (which might defeat the purpose of the whole thing by exposing your personal information) or buy from someone you trust (and the person might want to know and trust you, too).

Another way to buy bitcoin in the physical world for paper cash, which also has caveats, is to use a bitcoin ATM – a machine you might find in places like pharmacies, convenience stores and grocery stores.

However, over the years, bitcoin ATMs also became subject to regulations in some parts of the world, so if you choose this method you need to figure out if the ATMs available require ID verification to make a purchase or if they have other possible limitations.

Read More: Government Report Suggests Tightening Regulations on Crypto ATMs

For example, Genesis Coin ATMs in San Antonio, Texas, allow you to buy $20 to $500 worth of bitcoin using only your phone number. But if you want to buy more than that, you need an ID, according to the Coin ATM Radar website.

On the other side of the globe, the Kurant ATM network in Austria allows you to purchase up to EUR 250 ($286) worth of bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin or dash without ID verification, according to Coin ATM Radar.

There are plenty of websites monitoring the geography of bitcoin ATMs, like Coin ATM Finder or Bitcoin ATM Map. In any case, things can change over time both in the virtual and physical worlds, so it’s ultimately up to you to find the location and check if the ATM is still there, working and maintaining the same rules regarding KYC – or lack thereof.

For example, for my hometown of Moscow, both Coin ATM Finder and CoinATM Radar showed several ATMs by RusBit, located in grocery stores around the city center. Bitcoin ATM Map did not list them. No information was available regarding rules or limitations, so I went to check those machines myself.

In two of the listed locations, the ATMs working and did not require ID to use. But in the third location, the grocery store that used to host the ATM was…

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