Re: The Holy Grail! I wish I could kiss the author of Bitmessage on his face.

I don't think a lot of people realise this but localbitcoins.com is actually a centralised server model ... and does anyone know how much data they retain about all the recorded transactions/messaging that passes through their server? ... wonder which jurisdiction/locale the localbitcoins.com server is located in and what their privacy policy is by the way?

Correct, the next step is to make it a distributed P2P application. And there will be some dynamic changing local agencies provide trading with enough volume

The benefit for this approach is: Like in a private auktion, if Alice do a bank transfer to Bob and buy some bitcoin from him, banks don't know the reason behind that transaction, the privacy is kept very well. If you do the transaction through an escrow, then banks will know clearly this money is going into a bitcoin exchange, at least that escrow holds all the information about all the transactions related to exchange

The escrow is performed by the smart contracts function on the OT server ... https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/tree/master/scripts/smartcontracts/escrow how would the bank have any idea it was not just regular user making a transfer?

That OT server must be authorised by banks to access their SEPA transaction data, without that authorization it can only prove a bitcoin transaction, not a fiat money transaction

You changed from "banks will know clearly this money is going into a bitcoin exchange" to "OT server must be authorised by banks to access their SEPA transaction data" ... which are obviously two different issues. Interfaces with legacy banking system are problematic but they can't stop individuals making transfers or their money would become more useless than it already is ... the more barriers they put up to personal transfers the less valuable their money becomes ...