An Ode to LocalBitcoins (and a Lesson About Maintaining Bitcoin’s Public Goods)

Before the imposition of those compliance mechanisms, LocalBitcoins was a useful tool for people to enhance their privacy on-chain. But even after, the stripped-down service helped facilitate a native bitcoin economy – the platonic ideal of which would look like alphanumeric addresses interacting with similarly pseudonymous entities relying on Bitcoin’s architecture to estable mutual “trust.” The company onboarded and verified…