Quote from: South Park on September 16, 2023, 07:10:13 PM

Quote from: Learn Bitcoin on September 14, 2023, 01:15:27 AM

Indeed, you cannot deny the middleman's importance when dealing with an anonymous person on the internet. Reputation is a key factor there. If you can build a solid online reputation, you will likely get the payment or product first. This applies only to public forums like BitcoinTalk and hack forums. Still, this forum has middleman services to eliminate the possibility of scams.

The fact is, forum middlemen do not ask for your private information like your Real name, Identity or your electricity bills. But when you deal with some specific platforms like Binance and other centralized platforms, you compromise your private information.

Correct, on this forum the middleman only cares about being a middleman and as such their existence is not only tolerated but encouraged if you are making a transaction with an user you have never dealt before, however the middlemen that we find on the fiat system wants to know every single thing they can about you, and not only this robs you from your privacy, it also puts you at risk as those middlemen keep that information forever and they only need to be hacked once in order for your information to end up on the black markets.

Not only do they keep the data of the users. They sell them on the dark net at a cheap price. I have translated a thread of GazetaBitcoin, which is 12 years later and people still don't know to use Bitcoin nor what it's good for . I encourage everyone to read the original version, which was written by GazetaBitcoin. In this article, GazetaBitcoin provided the information and the sources as well that those centralized exchanges are involved in selling customers' private information. I would love to quote the part from that topic:

Quote from: GazetaBitcoin on January 18, 2021, 09:07:17 PM

Second of all, as I was saying above, people lose their personal information by going willingly through a very dangerous process, named KYC. The exchanges don't care about their clients nor about their personal information. They only want to earn more money. They can be hacked by hackers which, besides stealing money, also steal the users' personal information, this being a very precious resource, which can be turned into even more money, especially when it is sold on Dark Net. A CNBC article describes how the hackers sell personal information for 1$ a piece (this information consisting, among others, in physical addresses of the users, their credit / debit cards, copies of their IDs etc.): Hackers are selling your data on the ‘dark web’... for only $1. A notorious similar case from the forum is the case of the Romanian bekli23, which, while pretending he is decrypting old BTC wallets, he was also asking users to send him photos with them while holding their IDs and other bills in hand. Obviously, he was not decrypting any wallet. But he was trying to collect personal information, most likely, for selling it on Dark Net, for the ridiculous price of 1$ per piece!

In some cases, the exchanges are the ones selling customers' personal information! And I'm not talking about small, shady exchanges, but about the big ones. Coinbase is one of the biggest exchanges and yet it was caught selling clients' personal data! A 2019 article, Coinbase Admits Its Former Data Provider Sold Client Data, describes how Christine Sandler, one of the exchange's executives, admitted the company sold the users' personal information. Having this example, do you think that other exchanges don't do the same thing? Just they weren't caught yet?

I used a centralized exchange and was KYC'ed there without knowing these risks. This article explains why you should avoid centralized exchanges and banks. I understand that we have very limited options out there. But if you care about your privacy, you have to be careful.