LocalCryptos

LocalCryptos is the most private, secure and intuitive way to swap BTC or Ether with others for local currency.

People use LocalCryptos to exchange BTC or Ether for fiat money without counter‐party risk by using a trust‐less escrow concept. The peer‐to‐peer platform allows traders to skip the middle‐man and trade on their own terms, whether that be via bank transfer, any online payment service, cash in person, or any other mutual agreement between two people.

Trades executed using the LocalCryptos marketplace are confidential via end‐to‐end encryption, and, unlike traditional over‐the‐counter platforms, the escrow mechanism is decentralized. The only time the escrow arbiter can step in and transfer ether is if it receives explicit digital permission to resolve a dispute — but even then the smart contract code only allows the arbiter to transfer escrowed ether to one of the parties.

While cryptocurrency has succeeded in enabling people to conduct peer‐to‐peer transactions in a trust‐less way, there has been no such solution for entering or exiting the crypto‐economy. Because of the inherently insecure properties of centralised exchanges, billions of dollars have been stolen, lost, and destroyed in the hands of even the most popular services.

Although the number of cryptocurrency exchanges has grown, there has been little progress in eliminating trust from cryptocurrency on‐boarding. Instead, blockchain financial innovators are replicating the vulnerable systems of Wall Street stock exchanges and banks — the same systems that provoked the global financial crisis, and the same systems that motivated the genesis of Bitcoin.

The prime advantage of cryptocurrency over fiat is the elimination of the need for an intermediary. Instead of relying on an institution to keep a record of your balance (i.e. a bank), blockchains use a distributed ledger of transactions verified by a large network of computers.

The result is that it’s impossible for anybody to access your digital wallet without possession of your secret key, regardless of other circumstances. As long as your wallet’s private key is kept secret, your cryptocurrency is secure — the idea is similar to keeping an ounce of gold in a home safe. Instead of trusting somebody to hold your cryptocurrency for you, you only need to have trust in the laws of mathematics and the thousands of computers auditing the ledger around the clock.

But when you deposit or buy cryptocurrency on a centralized exchange, you don’t hold the private key to it. Instead, you need to trust the exchange, in the same way that you trust a bank, to hold on to your money and keep an accurate record of your balance.