Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone
not sure if this is even the right place in the forum to ask this but anyway.
so I always had a fare bit amount of information about the whole of cryptocurrencies and whats what .
so recently out of having nothing else to do I tried to set up a wallet and buy a few amount of btc (like 20 or 30 bucks ) . its nothing serious and I don't really care about the business side of it . so I tried to buy and guess what you need ID . well I have to tell you I'm from Iran .
so yeah OFAC ban , sanctions , phone restrictions and etc .. you name it we have it.
and even local legal sellers are controlled by government and they also verify you and thats even worse . not to mention they only work in high fees .
although you can find individual dealers by digging in telegram and thats easy but they have high rates and no trust .
so after 2 days the only way I found was this : buying giftcards here is really easy amazon razer mint itunes visa master etc and its legal and there is no need for ID.
paxful also doesn't need id for less than 1500$ ( I need a temp phone number for verification but that's easy )and it seems there are a lot of people who trade for giftcards on paxful . after that I can transfer the coins to another wallet from paxful ( however I heard people had problems for verification even for that ) . this way you can get about 15$ from a 20$ redeem code and that rate is not good but it's doable.
wanted to know if anyone can think of another way or some trusted place like a telegram group or something where you can do this without a third party like paxful . THANKS

I believe you can try to buy peer to peer without KYC (Know your customer).

You can try localbitcoins.com , if you find someone.

alternatively, you can try to buy in this forum.
You can try in the board Currency Exchange (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=53.0). Maybe you can find someone from Iran there.

take a deep look in their trust profile, to see if the guy can be trusted or not.


Can't you really give your documents to some reliable exchange to buy bitcoin? Is it illegal to buy bitcoin in Iran?

Where do the gift cards you can buy work? Are they Amazon.com cards for instance? I would've thought that would have to be the least painful option. I'd look on here first and deal with someone with track record. Paxful is US based so if they find out where you are you're going to have problems.

Why not buy here in the forum, in a P2P mode?
Here you can find people buying and selling BTC: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=53.0
There's a lot of honest people here in forum, you can check the reputation and a way to buy without need to KYC, you can use Paypal for example or another gateway, or even a Gift Card

But I'll be honest with you, do you think it's worth to do a lot of work, and have the risk with your country to buy a few dollars of BTC?

Thanks for the advise I will try them . and as I said local exchanges only work in big amounts and I don't want to go through the whole process for something small (not sure if you get what Im saying sorry for the bad english) . no its not illegal to buy but there are some laws (and the whole idea is not to deal with anything that the government has its hand in it .) however mining recently became illegal

amazon gifts are us and uk . Thanks for the advise .

thanks for the advise .
and no its not really worth it . that's why people don't do it here . but its not illegal and if it's just small fees it's fine .

I wouldn't risk getting my info out for $20-$30 of bitcoin, ever. If you really want to buy bitcoin, the best thing that you can do is to post a listing here on this forum and hope someone will take up on the offer. But even that would be somewhat of a stretch considering that there are a few Iranians here that do business in the forum. It's also hard to use debit/credit cards to receive and to send money from your country given that you could get a lot of trouble once you are caught.

If OP can get US and UK Amazon cards and from other companies to sell here then they should do fine. There's always steady demand for stuff like that. I'd even consider having one myself as long as he can guarantee I won't get a Hellfire up my arse.

Yeah, like others suggested. Do P2P trades on this forum or other available places. Use escrow if the amount is big (though people might not want to trade a newbie if he is paying using paypal or through other digital payment where transaction is reversible) and look for reputed sellers.
I remember seeing a signature on the forum named something bestexchanger or something that lists some third party exchange where you can trade between different currencies paypal, skrill etc. Though be careful,  those exchanges might be a scammers. Look at feedback from legit users when using them. Use it at your own risk!

Yes, gift cards seem to be one way to circumvent any unnecessary attention, and there's loads of it in the forum but I'm not sure how can OP secure one given his state. It's quite a paradox for OP but if he can find a way to at least get some of those--and I'm pretty sure there are tons of online sellers out there that can take his money for it--he'd be fine.

I can take up on the offer though if I have some coins to spare. There are no known repercussions here in my country if I ever dealt with someone from Iran so I'm good.

I have spoken to friends in Iran and they have echoed your story.

They also mentioned something about the official rate of the Iranian Rial and the street rate (or true going rate) being vastly different—and that it's impossible to cash out Rials at the government rate.

As far as I've heard, the only real way to get around it is by dealing out of the country. Travel to a nearby country like Turkey and deal for cash there.

Dont get me started here... im involved with Bitcoin for so long i forgot how painful process it is to new users buying small amount.
I mean, i recently tried to help friend buy his first pocket change Bitcoin. To provide him best learning experience, show how to use it.
Failed all the way. Process of verification on exchanges are way way way more strict than in banks. After uploading ID, address, all personal data, they still wanted more and more. I won't name exchange here coz this is not the point, but whole process is so painful i see reason Bitcoin adoption is so slow. I bet most people after seeing how much complex this process is they aborting mission all the way.

I Know It's weird but the gift cards are actually legit and I have used them myself before . there are many Iranian websites that sell them online and instantly . however visa or Master doesn't work here and anything that you buy online here is with the national banking system and it's only for the country (and surprisingly /: it's very fast and secure with zero errors)

Using Paxful will be dangerous, as they do not prohibit people from your country from using their site, so if anything goes wrong this may cause you to lose your money.
It might be better if you try some decentralized platforms like hodlhodl and bisq.
Regarding the sale of cards, it depends on your ability to buy any card and the market’s need for it. You can also sell services and other things.

yeah the whole money rate thing is a mess . we don't know how it's still running . Thanks anyway

I think the official rate and street rate are very different because obviously that's where people make money. I don't know that situation out there, but travelling should be out of the question for now. @bitmover suggestions might be the best option for you right now.

Why don't you try a bigger amount? Bitcoin is not that risky anymore. I believe that with 50 usd , or maybe 100, you can use an exchange.
It is safer for you, and you will have a better experience.

Just buy and move your coins to your wallet. You can try electrum.org

Many exchange have support for investing and buying altcoin assets using debit card like Binance and you can use your local exchange to buy some coin, never use difficult platform for your transaction and give bad impact after your payment success you not available for withdrawing and receiving your coins.

My first advice to you is that you should avoid telegram groups at all cost if you are looking to buy bitcoin; telegram groups who sell btc are full of scammers so flee.
If you want to buy P2P, you can check through the local bitcoins platform.

Since you have peeps who trade giftcards for bitcoin; you can contact them and buy bitcoin directly from them since you are friends.

Just one suggestion, be careful from scammer. Don't deal if you don't know the source is trusted enough. You may try LocalCrypto (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5204160.msg53167965#msg53167965) there isn't require KYC verification and the wallet will under control you means it's a non custodial wallet as well. Really this is an issue during buy crypto for first time if you don't know any trust person from black market. This kind of prevention encouraged peoples to use black markets to buy sell crypto currency.

Otherwise try to buy from this forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=53.0) by using trusted escrow service if the seller isn't trusted enough. So many scammers around you, even you may receive PM after made this post with offer to buy crypto. Just ignore them and go ahead with transparency.

I'm not using websites where you can buy Bitcoins out there like localbitcoins etc.

For me, here in the forum is one of the best way to buy Bitcoin but do it in bulks or in huge amounts (not that huge) so that you will not be eaten by escrow funds. There are many trusted users here that are offering escrow service. Buying Bitcoin isn't almost impossible but it is very possible with the help of the forum. There are many Bitcoin sellers in currency exchange section. You can just buy there and hire an escrow and you're good to go :).

Using Paxful to buy Bitcoins with gift cards is one of the most expensive options.
For a 100 USD gift card,you will get around 65 USD in most cases.It depends of the seller,but the fees are insane.
You can search for Discord servers related to cryptocurrency buying/selling or you can use Reddit.I remember about a subreddit that was created for BTC/gift card trading.Be careful with the scammers on both Discord and Reddit.Use trusted middlemen and check for valid reviews.
Back in 2015,I remember that I used a website called Virwox to buy BTC.You had to buy linden dollars with paypal and convert those linden dollars to BTC on Virwox.The fee was 15-20%,but I think that Virwox isn't accepting BTC trades anymore.

Thanks for your response and almost everyone is saying the same so buying in the forum seems to be the way . the only problem now is to get a better profile trust overall which I will try to do .

Ah, that's what I was wondering as well--and if bitcoin ownership was illegal in Iran I would have suggested that you just forget about it.

And yes, it's a pain in the ass to buy bitcoin if you want to do it anonymously and have a healthy mistrust of people.  You could check out the Currency Exchange section of the forum, but unless you have a reputation there aren't a lot of people willing to accept payment methods like PayPal and others.  I've never bought or sold bitcoin in person, but that's something you might want to look into.  Good luck in your quest, bro.

I have an acquaintance before from Iran and we have several transactions in paypal and my vcc Im just dont know if his buying it with bitcoin or any crypto or anything else from online payments but this maybe work you will use paypal to pay for your bitcoin and someone will buy it with credit card or vcc and btc will sent to you any trusted person with cc can do this for you just be careful dealing with.

I have not heard any thing about Iran getting serious with bitcoin or some of its kind but I guess it is pretty observable, who knows if you buy bitcoin with decentralized exchange?

Peer to peer transaction for beginner is not that recommendable for me, even if you are old user of bitcoin it's not that recommendable especially when you are going to send it first, hell no.

For some reason I would get it if Iran wants to ban the use of bitcoin locally since there have been some sort of war so terrorist won't have enough access to buy weapons on the underground market.