[HDBaseT]

Not really an "incompetent intermediary", Bitrefill, the company used for buying gift cards with Bitcoin received legal requests to identify the user. Bitrefill doesn't proclaim insane privacy protections, they are based out of Sweden but aren't immune to being requested to provide the information.

Monero could of helped, although its not easy to transfer BTC to Monero without P2P trades, as effectively every exchange requires KYC. Those source and destination wallet addresses are tainted, you wouldn't be able to deposit on any mainstream exchange and if they do, its for a honey pot purpose.

[tancop]

thats why btc/monero is not as great as a lot of people think.

ethereum has stablecoins and dex swaps so you dont have to do p2p once you have any tokens in the ecosystem, all you need is some eth to pay gas fees. and its the only crypto project i trust completely.

for privacy theres railgun and aztec, both have canonical bridges back to layer 1 and enough users to give you correlation resistance. tornado cash has compromised governance but i dont think the core contracts are broken so you can use that too, just be careful when you deal with americans because its illegal there.

kinda ironic that bitcoin is designed to be as trustless as possible but you need to trust third parties with you money a lot of the time because the core protocol is too simple for its own good.

[Cider9986]

>Monero could of helped, although its not easy to transfer BTC to Monero without P2P

It's really not hard but it probably gets much harder to transfer tainted Bitcoin. Trocador.app aggregates various no-KYC CEX swaps and is regarded well in the Monero community.

As we can see from the various Monero pumps, which often stemmed from cleaning coins. Thieves don't want to sit on the Bitcoin so they drive up the price of Monero selling it fast.

Yeah P2P is more technical. Hopefully with Serai we can get a good UX decentralized exchange.

Swapping into fiat is a different beast.

[LoganDark]

Making it possible to identify a user is incompetence, exactly because of legal issues like this. You don't run a service that accepts crypto for gift cards and then keep information on file that identifies the buyer personally, that's just stupid. But then again, you don't illegally obtain crypto and then give out your info when you go to use the illegal funds, that's just stupid as well.

Is P2P that big a deal? I swap coins on Bisq all the time. It's super easy to pick up and use if you already have the BTC. The biggest obstacle is obtaining some BTC in the first place when you don't have any yet. Once you have enough for the security deposit, you can buy/sell or swap thousands of dollars in funds at a time.