Monero: the secure, private, untraceable currency

Hello Monero Community,

I tend to think of silver as a physical form of Monero; both are private, and both have similar price volatility. Monero and silver are an interesting pair because they tend to follow different economic cycles -- when silver is in a bear market, Monero is probably in a bull market, and vice versa. Therefore, I want to be able to easily trade between these 2 assets once every couple years or so.

Some time ago, I tried to buy some physical silver bars, and I wanted to make the purchase directly in Monero -- not fiat or BTC -- I wanted to maintain my privacy for the entire transaction. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not find a good solution. My local bullion dealers do not accept Monero, and there are only 2 online bullion dealers who do accept Monero:

• Suisse Gold -- premiums are very high, and they charge $100 for shipping, which makes the trade too expensive.

• Veldt Gold -- usually everything is on "backorder", their premiums are too high, and their website doesn't even work if you try to make a purchase.

I am not happy with this situation, and I bet there are others like me out there somewhere, and so I want to try to do something about it: I want to create a Monero-focused online bullion dealer with fair prices -- something I would be happy to use myself.

Before I invest too much into this project, I first want to do a simple experiment to see if there is any market demand for this: I will see how long it takes to sell 30 of my nice silver bullion bars. I will post an update in a week or two to tell you how this experiment goes.

Just to get started, I am doing the trades on LocalMonero. If this works out, I'll set up a whole website for this, but LocalMonero is a great starting point -- it uses an escrow account to guarantee that nobody gets ripped off, and I'm happy to support them because they offer a great service to the Monero community. Here is the ad if you are interested: