If you are a very old bitcoin player, then you should have used or heard of LocalBitcoins, a site dedicated to P2P, or peer-to-peer, trading.This trading site works on a simple principle: you can post a post to sell or buy bitcoins, and others will see it and contact you to trade.
Initially, there were veteran players who used this site for local offline trading, mainly because there were a lot of scammers on it and it was easy to get scammed if you paid.That said, this trading site has given a lot of veteran players an introductory level experience with bitcoin, but they can’t hold out because of the cryptocurrency winter.
LocalBitcoins released an announcement stating that it was originally established (founded in June 2012) with the goal of making Bitcoin ubiquitous and promoting global financial inclusion.
However, due to the cryptocurrency winter, LocalBitcoins has tried very hard to overcome the challenges, but has come to the conclusion that it can no longer offer bitcoin trading services.So all users of the community should bring up their bitcoins in a timely manner, and by this time next year if bitcoins have not been brought up then withdrawals will no longer be supported.
The specific schedule is as follows.
- February 9, 2023: No new user registrations will be available
- February 16, 2023: LocalBitcoins.com will no longer be available for trading and wallets will no longer be available (does not affect withdrawals)
- February 17, 2023: LocalBitcoins.com users can only log in and withdraw their bitcoins from their wallets, no more trading or storage
- February 17, 2024: Withdrawals will no longer be available, so please be sure to withdraw your entire wallet balance by this date.
Why it loses users:
It’s no surprise that LocalBitcoins are falling out of favor, both from the impact of centralized cryptocurrency exchanges and from their own problems.
Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges offer users a more convenient and reliable service, and there are a variety of cryptocurrency derivatives to invest in selectively.
One of the big problems with LocalBitcoins is that there is more fraud, i.e. more buyer fraud as above, yes buyer fraud not seller fraud.
The main reason for this is that PayPal can seek to dispute revoked payments, which has led to many sellers paying for bitcoins and then buyers withdrawing their transactions resulting in payments being hacked.
Although the site introduced more transaction methods and certified sellers later, most users still switch to centralized exchanges to buy or sell cryptocurrencies.
You can export data now:
If you are a LocalBitcoins user and want to keep your data, you can now log in to the site and export your transaction and conversation type data.
I signed up for LocalBitcoins in about 2013 or 2014, but I don’t use it much, so I have relatively little data to export.
The data provided includes: historical transaction data, transaction conversations, contacts, personal information, and login history, so I can only say that I downloaded a copy to commemorate the occasion.