The exchanges and sites we grew to know and love had a need to stay alive hence the KYC bonkersdom. That's the price of increased growth and visibility. It's only going to go in one direction.

Back in the day you could buy inside the blockchain.info wallet with Paypal. That's the luxury of being obscure. As soon as that goes out the window it's time to man up.

Hopefully proper p2p stuff is going to get more robust and easier to use. Right now it's on the painfully clunky side.

And it turns out the one true anon exchange, btc-e, was probably a giant money laundering machine.