There is: https://localbitcoins.com/

I'm friends with Dan Boneh. I would highly recommend his course and the second course he is also offering in a few weeks. Dan is an expert on fully homomorphic encryption and one of his grad students actually created the first fully functional system:

https://crypto.stanford.edu/craig/craig-thesis.pdf

In my opinion, Dan is one of the top five cryptologists in the world right now and it is really amazing that he committed to teach these courses. I'd also recommend David Evan's class on Udacity:

https://www.udacity.com/course/cs387

I am very excited about BTC for numerous reasons but I already have practical reasons to be excited.  I will be saving an easy $100 in a month when our family goes on vacation on exchange fees.  How?  We are going to meet up with a local resident and exchange our BTC for fiat and save ourselves the expensive fees banks will charge us for doing that.    We are also looking for restaurants that will take BTC so we do not have to pay exchange fees as well.  Already, I am really happy to have BTC, and this is just one little example.

Just to update everyone in case it's not clear:

I've arrived back from Bkk and have sample chips from steamboat, final needed parts from Mouser, and K16 boards from China. I will be initially testing power supply on the boards and then PIC on the K1 and then mount an ASIC on a K1 for comm. tests. So barring unexpected set backs (like solder paste that turns out to be useless), I should be able to report something on ASIC communication within a day or two.

Don't be surprised if this bot is running a specifically unoptimized algorithm to decide how to trade, which in turn leads to more profitability for the creator. Never trust bots that aren't programmed by yourself. The only bot that can truly be on your side is one you've written from absolute scratch.

I wish I made an account a long time ago.