It seems there are really only a couple ways to buy bitcoin without leaving a digital trail:
- Buy from someone in person
- Send cash via mail order, wait for the seller to send the bitcoin, using something like Bisq for escrow
- Buy gift cards (i.e. Amazon) with cash and sell them p2p.
- Buy from ATM's.
The problems with 1) are:
- What if I don't know anybody in person who's willing to sell?
- Maybe I do, but I don't want them to know how much bitcoin I have, and I am revealing my identity to them.
- They may be an inconsistent source of bitcoin (maybe they only wanted to sell one time or in specific conditions)
Problems with 2) are:
- Trades take a long time to finish and are inconvenient.
- Risky, since it could get lost in the mail? I'm not sure how common this is.
- Only onchain available.
Problems with 3):
- Can't do very large amounts.
- The buyer of the gift card doesn't know where they were sourced from so Amazon accounts, for example, could get cancelled if they look suspicious.
- Since what you can buy is limited to what the company offers, and since there's more inherent risk, you have to pay a much higher premium than other methods, except maybe ATM.
- Have to keep walking into stores and buying gift cards all the time.
Problems with 4):
- Very few no-KYC ATMs (if any?).
- It seems at minimum (for LibertyX, which as far as I could tell is the most widely available low-KYC), you need a phone number, so if you really wanted no-KYC then you'd have to buy a burner phone just for this or use something like lnvpn's phone number service while you make the purchase.
- High fees
Given the convenience and extra privacy benefits that come with lightning if done correctly, my favorite so far has been to use robosats with method 3) using a custodial lightning address that was signed up for with an anonymous email using something like protonmail or tutanota.
You could probably do even better by getting a custodial lightning address by signing up with nostr (you can do this flow here on SN for example).
Disappointingly, it seems that most trades on all these p2p sites happen with things that are not really no-KYC if push came to shove. Most people seem to be using Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, Zelle, or, even worse, Strike, and they therefore have to trust a) their trading partner and b) the company to not dox their banking details, and c) their bank to not get suspicious for some reason and freeze their account.
c) happened recently to a stacker here, he may have thought he was being no-KYC, and maybe his bank doesn't know he bought bitcoin, but the result of his frequent trading was a frozen bank account and a fraud investigation due to this p2p trading. And this type of p2p trading seems most popular on all the p2p sites. Unfortunately, the only large trades over lightning seem to be done this way.
In an ideal scenario, I would use something like a no-KYC CashApp that I could load up to get the best of both worlds -- nothing tied to me, but also the much lower fees, faster & more convenient trading, and much larger volumes that I can't get right now with the credit card method.
I thought about using reloadable prepaid VISA/Mastercard gift cards, but it doesn't seem possible to use them on things like CashApp/Venmo etc., and they have high fees for use anyway.
Has anyone figured out a better solution here? I'll keep doing the gift card or cash by mail methods if need be, but it's crazy that there isn't another way. I guess that's why we need bitcoin in the first place.