Hi SN!
My apologies for going dark. I was posting consistently during my travel adventures in Africa (Cairo2Cape) but got caught up with a new job and have been MIA since. I have started to document those travel journeys in a book (will post about this separately).
I joined www.bringin.xyz, where we enable seamless EUR on/off ramp with Lightning and NWC compatibility and don't take custody of your Bitcoin. The founder built this company to solve the problem he encountered 2 years ago. Trying to sell Bitcoin from his hardware wallet to Revolut took days, and that's if the transaction wasn't blocked. With Brigin, this happens in a minute (Lightning and SEPA Instant).
An IBAN is provided for each user so when you send money to your traditional bank (say Santander, BNP or Revolut), the incoming transaction appears as your name, not Bringin avoiding any flags for the bank. This prevents your account from getting blocked for 'suspicious or crypto activities.'
Due to the stringent rules of the EU (upcoming MiCa), we have to KYC (everyone will soon). That said we are striving to provide a tool to enable folks to live off Bitcoin. We want hyperbitcoinization as much as anyone but until bitcoin is accepted everywhere, the reality is we have one foot in bitcoin and one foot in fiat.
I'm not originally European and don't have a network on the continent. I was hoping to learn more about your preferences and the solutions you use to buy, sell, spend bitcoin:
- Are there any challenges with those solutions?
- If you had a magic wand, what would you solve?
PS. I hope to keep this constructive, I know P2P is the best approach from a privacy standpoint. KYC is not ideal but unfortunately, we're not going to onboard the next 100M users in Europe that way.