I havent yet found a market place which doesnt require me to have an email address, a phone number with SMS validation and to tell them my real name. bitcoin.de WTF? Might as well give them a blood and DNA sample?
Why is this so? Isnt bitcoin supposed to be pseudonomous?
Yes, but the rest of the world isn't. Financial companies still must comply with laws (tax evasion, money laundering, etc) regardless if they're going dollars to euros or dollars to bitcoins. Much of the current hype around bitcoins comes specifically from recent comments regarding regulation of bitcoin transactions.
Also, you want to buy because the price recently spiked? That's rarely a good idea (whether in stocks, real estate or bitcoins).
I honestly feel the same way. I want to play around by, say, buying $100 in Litecoin but I find all of the different avenues pretty invasive. The closest I found was buying Litecoin in person, but none of the listed sources were anywhere close to me geographically.
if you're going to buy bitcoins anonymously, you'll probably have to do it locally with cash.
Check out: http://localbitcoins.com
But you can just buy them through somewhere like Coinbase, then use Bitcoin Fog to make them anonymous.
If you leave them in Bitcoin Fog for a couple of days / weeks, there is very little chance they'll be traced back to you.
> And once again, running through Tor makes it not likely for us to be shut down under pressure from the authorities. When in doubt about this, consider Silk Road.
When I consider Silk Road, it makes me less confident that this service won't be shut down.