I’ve been noticing this lately. If you want to buy Monero or other cryptocurrencies, you have to KYC, set up accounts, have a bank account, wire money, all that stuff.
However, if you want to spend it or sell it there are a plethora of options, as simple as buying a prepaid card, or just doing business with people that accept it directly.
Bonus: once your capital is in Monero or Bitcoin or something, moving it around is relatively easy with swap services, atomic swaps and the like. Even p2p services, you don’t have to worry about PayPal, bank accounts, cash in the mail or any of that. Once your capital is internet native you’re golden.
This is a sign to me that it’s more valuable than fiat and people are seeing that. Now it makes more (practical, tangible) sense to get all your capital into cryptocurrency than keeping it in fiat and just buying cryptocurrency when you need it, as it was a few years ago. If you can get all your capital into Monero or something, you can easily get fiat when you need it, the reverse is not as true.
I predict that the barriers to entry will be increasingly bigger than the barriers to exit as time goes on, in an attempt to stop the bleeding, but that it will backfire into people preferring crypto directly and make things better for all of us. And this also means less of a need to exit in the first place.
I recently bought montero using LocalMonero recently and I didn’t kyc or anything like that. Although I did use Revolut to make the exchange, there’s other ways to exchange monero there that don’t require KYC, like cash in hand, revolut, cash by mail, bank transfer, transfer wise, paysafe and some others. I bet you can find a way that satisfies your needs there.
I do agree that it’s a little hard to buy monero nowadays, most of the trades there require KYC or some other verification and sites that provide an exchange require KYC like Kraken or something but if you’re willing to dig a little harder you can find people willing to accept that money for you.
All of that besides cash by mail requires KYC with the fiat payment processor. And cash by mail has it’s own risks.
That said, it’s the only way I’ll do it going forward. The rest of it is just too cumbersome. I don’t want a bank account, used to be I needed one, now with crypto who really does? It’s artificially propped up. So it’s just another obstacle to me.