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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

I bought my first bitcoins using local bitcoins many many years ago, must’ve been around a decade at this point.

A guy showed up to a location with a duffel bag and a handgun. I put some money into a bag and gave him a public key. We sat there for about 20 minutes and chitchatted while we waited for the BTC to arrive in my wallet.

All you kids with your fancy exchanges and dexes these days!

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Same here, except it was a doctor! He said just make an appointment on my website like a patient would. So I sat there in the waiting room for a while, entered and then did the transaction. He said during his student years he was basically "printing bitcoins". As one of the first in the game he must have had a fuckton.

I mined two blocks (100 btc) when I was a student. It took a month on my PC (CPU mining). It was fun. Few months later I found out that I could actually sell them and immediately did so for $15 and thought that it was a great deal.

Now I wish I would write down the blocks I mined. Just for history.

You're braver than me. If a stranger who knows I have cash on me shows up with a gun, I'm bailing.

The key is to bring your own gun.

I think I'd rather have a gunless transaction altogether :D

You would be just as vulnerable, except without the protection of Mutually Assured Destruction — just whomever is stronger wins if it goes sideways.

Yeah, but I don’t want to be in a situation where “mutually assured destruction” is even a thing. I live in a country where I could get a license and get a gun, I’ve never felt the need to as it’s continually safer year after year. If I meet someone here who feels the need to arm themselves for safety in public, I am assuming that person is a little unhinged and that getting involved with them has the potential for trouble.

This may be locale-specific though, it could be a totally normal thing to walk around with a gun elsewhere.

We all live in a Hobbesian state of nature. Most people are vaguely aware of this but only really get it if they find themselves in a terrible moment when they realize that no one else and no system is coming to save them.

Where I live, I wouldn't be surprised if I walked past a handful of people with a gun in their waistband at the grocery store. Or a couple at the gas station. You don't even need a permit to do so here. And I have yet to end up in the middle of a shootout. Probably because the risk is too high for criminals as the barrier to entry for defending yourself is essentially zero, except for the price of a gun and ammo.

The nice thing about that is it has a "herd immunity" effect. If many people carry around you, but the criminals don't know which person that is, they're likely to refrain from picking on anybody directly. You don't even have to carry yourself to benefit from it.

The only crime that happens often in this city, despite that, is parked & vacant cars getting smashed into and robbed. Because it only happens when nobody's looking.

Yeah, I think it’s location-specific, maybe where you are wearing a gun at (say) the local shop is a totally normal thing, but here it would be really fucking weird and possibly even a cause to be worried

I don't want to be in that kind of situation either.

I can't comment any further without going way off-topic from the article about LocalBitcoins.

If you wanna go off-piste it’s totally fine! This is an interesting topic, in my opinion, and it’s not like there’s any bad blood or conflict. Just people in different places with different norms and experiences.

They key is to bring your own sniper

I assure all people that I meet up with that the dead man’s switch attached to the tactical nuke in my backpack is fully functional

My bank experience is severely lacking in handguns. Was Bitcoin the answer all this time?!

At the bank the firearms are just hidden from you. They're there.

There are definitely no firearms at most if not all banks in Canada, aside from the Brinks truck drivers for the ten minutes they’re refilling an ATM. In fact, thinking about it, I’ve never seen a security guard stationed at a bank.

But guns are extremely restricted in Canada, so that isn't as much of a relevant contrast. Even so: banks have their guns ;P.

https://www.westernstandard.news/news/bank-of-canada-was-sti...

Probably only if you live in dangerous is of the world.

Not your gun, not your bitcoin

Not your DNA, not your gun

This guy Americas

Good times. I never had the experience of being the one showing up with the cash, which would put a whole other level of paranoid fuck on the situation, but I was aware of people posted at the doors to keep an eye on me when I received it. Once you've done it once or twice with the same trader it gets easier...

I used to just take bank transactions on localbitcoins - until the bank shut down my bank account!

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