I, personally, don't ever use coinbase or any other service that requires you to attach it to a legal strawman. From there, all of your future crypto transactions will be linked to that legal record.
The best ways to buy crypto are directly from other humans, via ATMs (most cities have them), or using something like LocalBitCoins (which is still other humans, but a way to find them).
Unfortunately, because steem is so small and used by very few people, there is no way to buy it directly from government currencies, you'll have to buy BTC/ETH/DASH/LTC and then swap that for STEEM.
Aha. I did end up buying some (well, bank is delaying the transfer at mo. but I think it will work) via Localbitcoins, but I still had to do ID checks. But future transactions will only be tied to straw man if I use that same avenue to buy, will it not?
Thanks for the tip on ATM's, I will look out for that option in future.
Ah, localbtc must have gone the way of KYC now. Did you just have to verify an account? Because if the transaction itself isn't linked to that ID info, then you should still be safe.
The problem is that once you have a transaction tied to a legal person, every transaction stemming from that will be tracked right back to it. For example, if I were to set up a coinbase account, link banking/ID info, and buy some BTC, that wallet is fully traceable. Now, say I send that bitcoin to blocktrades, and they send steem to my account, that transaction is also public, so now there is a record of my steem account receiving funds from that bank account, and so on. Unless you are using one of the "privacy coins" (monero, bitcoin confidential), everything is public. It's not a problem as long as you never make that connection to the legal person, but as soon as you do, every wallet/transaction/account along the way is easily tracked right back to the same banking legal person.
Thanks. So now I have downloaded the Edge wallet which appears to be private so transactions cannot be followed. My plan is to send the BTC's I am buying through Localbitcoins to this wallet, then send to Blocktrades so I can buy SBD. What do you think?
Having said that my bank transfer to the Localbitcoins dealer has not yet gone through. My bank is delaying it I guess cos they don't like crypto. the BTC's which I am buying are currently in escrow awaiting my payment but BTC has gone down in price so I'm also considering stopping the payment then buying BTC using bury through the edge wallet. And Bity purchases are anonymous so perhaps this would be better. Yet maybe not ethical or good karma to cancel the Localbitcoins purchase as price is down. Mind you I'm only buying £200 worth if BTC so only about £10 loss at mo. Thoughts?
Now my bank has cancelled the transfer to Localcoins and say if I try to buy crypto again they may cancel my account!
So, I will now try to buy through Bity (no ID required) with Edge wallet