Bitcoin Forum

http://digitalmoneytimes.com/crypto-news/bitcoin-trading-volume-on-localbitcoins-sets-new-record/

Despite Bitcoin being associated with nefarious activities and often being dubbed as “magic internet money”, there is a vast interest in people who want to obtain a piece of this digital currency. Overall Bitcoin trading volume has been increasing over the past year or so, and peer-to-peer marketplaces such as LocalBitcoins have seen a tremendous growth in volume as of late.

It's good to hear that their is increasing demand for Bitcoins on sites like LocalBitcoins in the US, I can also see why as new users would likely want to trade a few coins and not need to go through an intensive verification process.

In my country, Localbitcoins are very popular. It is a little bit difficult to use the other Bitcoin exchanges, as deposits and withdrawal of fiat money takes a lot of time. But I am concerned about my privacy, while using LocalBitcoins. In the past few months, large number of people have been arrested for using their services. Some of the examples are here:

http://www.coindesk.com/localbitcoins-users-criminal-charges-florida/

The best part of this article, "Creating a marketplace where you can interact with buyers and sellers directly is one of the ideas Satoshi Nakamoto had in mind when the world was introduced to Bitcoin. Cutting out the middleman in our daily financial lives is a possibility, and sometimes even a necessity. It only makes sense to trade this disruptive digital currency in a way that does not involve middlemen."

We should not have all these middlemen at all.. they are just skimming the cream from the milk, and they serve as a tool for governments to infringe on our financial privacy.

I have nothing to hide, but I want the same degree of privacy, as I get when I use cash.

The question we should ask is... Why have there been a spike in the buying and trade of Bitcoin on a platform that has no influence on the price?

$4.8 million worth of Bitcoins traded in one week (in the United States alone), comes to around $690,000 per day, which is equivalent to some BTC3,000. Major exchanges such as BTC-e, Bitstamp, Bitinstant, and Kraken deal with many times this amount every day. So I have to say that although this might be an internal record for Localbitcoins, they have a long way to catch up to the major exchanges.

I guess we should take their daily/weekly volume with a pinch of salt. Just look at their 24H chart https://bitcoinity.org/markets/localbitcoins/usd

This is very interesting.  I considered using them, but the markup on btc was so high in my area that I decided to just do a bank transfer.  If I want to be anonymous in the future I can just use a mixer and a new wallet or whatever.