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Comment by jalev | Hacker News Reader

What about trying to buy Bitcoins from a country that isn't the US? I shouldn't have to send you the left arm of my first-borne to verify I'm a human being and then be limited to performing any transaction in dollars.

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In Australia, https://www.coinjar.com/ works.

If you ask for non-US based services, it's probably worth specifying where you are. BTC exchange services are very jurisdiction-specific at the moment.

Kraken, an EU exchange, allows you to trade up to $10,000.00 a month without scanning in your ID; just need to put in your name, DoB, phone number, and address. The downside is that not many people trade on it.

Used https://bittylicious.com/ for small amounts (UK, NL, CZ, used to have KR but seems like not anymore). The price was 20-30% higher than Bitstamp, but that got covered by the increase, and at least I don't have register my bank account, wait few days, then denied (language barrier here in Taiwan) like they did.

Edit: Well, currently they seem 50% overpriced, so maybe this is not such a good idea, unless you really just want "some" BTC to use instead as an investment.

In Europe you may want to use Bitstamp, otherwise I would suggest you to buy through LocalBitcoins (as the blogpost says), or if you understand the concept of WoT then you can try with Bitcoin-OTC :)

You can use Virwox, but it's a bit expensive unless you live in Argentina. If you happen to live in Argentina, you can get the cheapest BTC on the world by buying with your credit card in Virwox.

Why is this?

There is a ~24% gap between the price you pay in ARS for credit card purchases in USD and what the USD sells for in the black market. This opens up all sorts of arbitrage opportunities that the government struggles to plug.

If you have USD in cash, you can sell them for close to 10 ARS and then buy BTC at about 7.34 exchange rate.

Credit card purchases are charged the official USD exchange rate ~6 ARS + ~20% (the real exchange rate, or the one everyone accepts in the streets is ~10 ARS). The government will pay the difference for no logical reason, consider it an irrational player. And for even stranger reasons people don't realize this, and they also think Bitcoin is a scam, no matter what you tell them. Therefore nobody does this Virwox trick and it stays under the radar, undetected for years.

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