And how are people buying/trading bitcoin now if they don't want to use third-party exchanges or custodial wallets?
I'm doing some research and writing about the history of bitcoin, and am curious if there are any OG bitcoiners out there who can tell me how it worked before bitcoin got big.
It's simple if you ask me, peer to peer(p2p) was it, even the bitcoin white paper referred to bitcoin as money that can be transferred through a peer to peer electronic means, I am not an OG, but when I first came around and learnt about bitcoin, bitcoin was traded through p2p, like we have it in most centralized exchanges today, which I would say have become advanced, in those days, it was the manuel version of p2p that we used, that is, if you have cash and want to buy bitcoin, you get across to someone who have bitcoin and wants to sell it for cash, you transfer your cash to the person, and make your bitcoin address available to him or her, and the person will transfer the amount of bitcoin paid for, to your wallet.
It was that simple, though there were alot of scams through this means of trading.