Mats problem is that he is stuck on the idea that the only right way to make money is to daytrade. Realizing that he sucks at it, he doubles down and loses even harder.
Meanwhile I just made a hundred bucks in two minutes by buying on localbitcoins and immediately reselling on kraken. There are plenty of ways to make things work for the open minded.
In-person or purely online?
I always deal in cash in person, on principle. I want as little middleman involvement as possible (banks, other third parties) and I don't like "paper trails". Personal privacy is one of my big issues.
And how, if I may ask, you deal with BTC pseudonimity? Are you so paranoid to keep everything separated, un-linked (with mixers etc.)?
I would love to have a more fungible bitcoin in this case.
I don't quite go that far (though maybe I should - something to consider for the future). The main point (for me at this time) is to build a customer base and to have banks as uninvolved as possible.
Minimum safeguards can be using a unique address for each transaction (or at least mostly attempting such), and sending coins to locations, such as exchanges, that are less involved in gathering your personal information.
It does become a little bit cumbersome to deal with multiple address, but you can attempt to develop systems to deal with keeping track and organizing such... even though less than a perfect situation.
Electrum automatically creates new unique addresses (optional to use them, but they are there). However at the moment that's not what I use on my phone. It's just not important enough for the moment.
Which wallet - or app do you use? Are you trading directly through local bitcoins, and then using their wallet? I am pretty sure that they are changing the address for every transaction, even though you may not be able to see that under the surface?
I use the local bitcoin wallet for my first transactions with folks, but then after I get to know them, I will do future transactions directly by using the Blockchain app.... and I manually create new addresses with the blockchain app (sometimes I will reuse the addresses a few times before I transfer all of the coins out and archive them).
And, you are correct with your indication (by your description of your situation as an example) that there are going to be differing levels of efforts that are made in the direction of attempting some level of privacy.