There’s A New Service To Privately Trade Monero To Bitcoin

There’s a new way to anonymously trade Monero for Bitcoin

Mycoinchange doesn’t collect personal information or transaction records, meaning that Bitcoin swaps stay private.

In brief

• Mycoinchange is a decentralized exchange that collects neither personal information nor transaction records.

• It can be used to privately swap Bitcoin for Monero.

• One critic argued exchanges could refuse to serve customers who’ve used the service.

It’s now easy to trade Monero to Bitcoin in a completely anonymous fashion.

Mycoinchange is a way of transferring cryptocurrencies on a separate blockchain — one that is much harder to observe. The company has announced it has added the privacy-first cryptocurrency, Monero to its privacy-centered decentralized exchange.

Customers can trade Monero with a few other assets, including Bitcoin, ETH, BCH, LTC, and XRP.

In theory, Mycoinchange thus makes crypto private again, skirting around recent regulation designed to identify senders and recipients of crypto transactions. For instance, the Fifth Anti Money Laundering Directive, which was implemented earlier this year, and the Financial Action Task Force’s “Travel Rule”, which was implemented in mid-2019, both require crypto exchanges to collect more information about their customers.

Users on Mycoinchange don’t have to submit personal information to participate (that means none of the KYC, or Know-Your-Customer checks, that centralized exchanges require), and the exchange doesn’t keep records of addresses, or transaction amounts when choosing to do so.

But there’s a catch

The only way privacy can be fully realized is if there’s no black hole like Mycoinchange to enter and exit, which only draws attention to the user. If you have a trace in the BTC ledger, you are no longer private. Instead you should make all the transactions equally and uniformly private by only transacting within the Monero network.

The LocalMonero co-founder also said that it’s not inconceivable that BTC addresses that are linked to Mycoinchange will automatically get blacklisted (Binance, for instance, blocked withdrawals to the privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet, Wasabi). This would make any Bitcoin coming out of Mycoinchange “worth less than ‘clean’ bitcoins.”

The service isn’t illegal, and wallets have “Read Only” keys that can be submitted to, say, tax authorities. In any case, what’s important is that it gives people more freedom, and does not go against any laws.