And this lecture, I want to talk about crypto exchanges.
These are services that allow us to exchange one cryptocurrency to another.
This can be very useful because you might want to get a certain crypto, for example, Monero, but
you can't find any peer to peer sellers in your area, or there are no ATMs which you can use to get
that cryptocurrency.
Therefore, you can get a more popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and then exchange it to Monero.
Right now I'm only talking about Bitcoin and Monero, but there are a lot of different types of cryptocurrencies
that you can exchange.
So learning how to use exchanges will open the door to so many possibilities.
For example, what you can do is you can use cash, so use an anonymous method to buy bitcoins.
So you're already anonymous at this point.
And then to increase your anonymity, use a crypto exchange to exchange bitcoins to Monero and then
you're very, very anonymous and very hard to trace.
Alternatively, let's say the end goal is you want bitcoins because you're sending money to a person
or a seller that only accepts bitcoin, but you want to be as anonymous as possible.
Then you can buy Monero with cash again using one of the methods I explained in the previous lecture
and then convert this Monero to Bitcoin using a crypto exchange.
Now as you know, cash is anonymous.
Transferring the money into a Monero wallet will make it even more anonymous, like we said, because
it hides the sender and the receiver and it's not lockable and then send that to bitcoins will make
your bitcoins very, very anonymous and very hard to trace and tie to your identity.
Alternatively, let's say you tried everything and you could not buy a cryptocurrency with cash with
an anonymous method.
That's fine.
You can use an exchange service such as Coinbase and others that would verify your identity, and then
the money you use will be tied to your identity.
But you transfer that money to Monero Wallet again.
Once you do that, that link is broken because Monero hides the sender and the receiver using ring signatures
and stealth addresses.
Therefore, once you send that money to a bitcoin wallet, it's very anonymous and the bitcoin address
that you're going to use will not be linked to your identity, even though you verify your identity
when you bought the cryptocurrency, when you bought Monero for the first time.
You can do the same again.
Use a service that verifies your identity because these are available in everywhere in the world.
So you can always use them as a last resort and again buy bitcoins.
Now, at this stage, the Bitcoin address will be linked to your identity because Bitcoin is not anonymous.
But once you convert that bitcoin into Monero, the link is broken and this wallet right here will be
very private and will not be linked to your identity.
All of this is possible thanks to exchange services that allow us exchange one cryptocurrency to another,
and the anonymity is possible because of the way Monero is implemented, because of the way it uses
ring signatures and stealth addresses.
Now to go even one step further and become very, very anonymous, what you can do is you can use what's
known as churning.
And basically whenever money arrives into a Monero wallet, you can transfer it between multiple Monero
wallets before sending it to another place or before converting it to another currency.
Or you can literally send the money to the same wallet again with Monero Sender and the receiver are
not linked.
So every time you send money from one address to another, even if you send it to the same wallet,
that increases the distance between the wallet and the source of the funds, therefore making it very,
very difficult to trace.
So in order to be able to do all of this, you'll have to use a crypto exchange.
Now, there are a number of crypto exchanges.
If you just go on Google and type crypto exchange, you'll get a lot of services.
If you go to get Monero community, you will see a number of services here as well, and I will include
this in the resources of this lecture.
And like I said, the policies of these services change often.
So always stay updated on what's new.
Always stay updated to see which ones will require to register and verify ID or not.
But at the time of recording this lecture, a really good service is morph token right here.
It doesn't require us to sign up and it doesn't require ID verification.
Using these services is pretty much the same.
Therefore, in the next lecture, I'm going to show you how to use this one just as an example.
But you'll be able to apply the same steps when using other similar services.