Don't mean to be a downer but seems like bad opsec to walk around advertising to the world that you own crypto. Just saying. Maybe something more subtle/obscure?

Any advice out there how to reasonably buy bitcoin or a stablecoin or any crypto with physical cash?

ATMs are asking 7-20% fee, the exchange rate is undisclosed and there is often KYC. Direct Deposit into an ATM is not an option in the US (unlike Australia).

Bisq or Hodlhodl rarely has the trading pairs with cash. AgoraDesk and LocalMonero has folded.

The exchanges want KYC. The online bank apps like Revolut and Wise want KYC.

The best I can think of is: Cash<>US Bank Account<>Coinbase USDC<>Coinbase USDT<>TradeOgre USDT<>BTC or XMR<>Cold Wallet.

Any advice please?

I'm assuming you mean cash-by-mail? If you don't see a trading pair on Bisq, just make your own offer and leave it up for a day or so.

Someone will take it pretty quick if its a reasonable rate. Closer to 0% the faster it will be snatched up.

did you try old bisq or bisq2

Any advice out there how to reasonably buy bitcoin or a stablecoin or any crypto with physical cash?

ATMs are asking 7-20% fee, the exchange rate is undisclosed and there is often KYC. Direct Deposit into an ATM is not an option in the US (unlike Australia).

Bisq or Hodlhodl rarely has the trading pairs with cash. AgoraDesk and LocalMonero has folded.

The exchanges want KYC. The online bank apps like Revolut and Wise want KYC.

The best I can think of is: Cash<>US Bank Account<>Coinbase USDC<>Coinbase USDT<>TradeOgre USDT<>BTC or XMR<>Cold Wallet.

Any advice please?

Any advice out there how to reasonably buy bitcoin or a stablecoin or any crypto with physical cash?

ATMs are asking 7-20% fee, the exchange rate is undisclosed and there is often KYC. Direct Deposit into an ATM is not an option in the US (unlike Australia).

Bisq or Hodlhodl rarely has the trading pairs with cash. AgoraDesk and LocalMonero has folded.

The exchanges want KYC. The online bank apps like Revolut and Wise want KYC.

The best I can think of is: Cash<>US Bank Account<>Coinbase USDC<>Coinbase USDT<>TradeOgre USDT<>BTC or XMR<>Cold Wallet.

Any advice please?

The entire developed world tax apparatus that was built in the 20th century and extends into the 21st century depends on ubiquitous financial surveillance.

They are not going to give that up without a fight. I have been saying at a number of conferences and podcasts that privacy is the main battleground for the next decade.

Back in the 19th century and before, money was mostly private. There were plenty of dictators but there was no major method of surveilling all transactions. Therefore things like broad income taxes were untenable to enforce.

But in the 20th century as money increasingly moved around at the speed of light, people needed bank accounts to keep up. It wasn’t all forced on them; they chose it. And those bank accounts were centralized, surveillable, and ruggable.

This allowed authorities to switch to income taxes, which require ubiquitous financial surveillance to work. And ultimately it allowed them to switch to fiat currency altogether.

Now in the 21st century, Bitcoin and its various layers allow people to hold and move around money globally without permissioned banks. They can do so peer to peer, or they can do so with custodians and open layers, etc. Unlike the base layer of fiat, the base layer of bitcoin is permissionless.

But this represents a threat to the entire current system of taxation and financial control. If bitcoin and particularly various private methods on top of it were to be adopted at massive scale, the entire tax structure and other things would need to reshape themselves around that reality. And so they won’t make it easy; they will try to criminalize financial privacy as much as possible while the network is still pretty small.

The only solutions are to 1) make privacy tech so ubiquitous that it can’t be isolated and can spread organically in a distributed way and 2) to apply legal pressure when possible so that governments sort of have to operate within the bounds of their own law, like the 1st and 4th amendments.