I am looking at haveno-reto and it has the exact same problem I had with bisq. in order to buy monero on haveno, you have to already have some monero, so you can do a security deposit. so haveno helps to reduce the number of times you have to interact with a CEX or KYC yourself, but it doesn’t completely eliminate it. you may still have to do it at least once, like buying some litecoin on a CEX and changing it to some monero. I’d rather start clean with no KYC and it’s very important to me.

what I am still trying to wrap my head around is, on localmonero and even localbitcoins it was possible for a person to buy coins without already having any. there were always some sellers who would let you send maybe a couple hundred bux even if you had no account history or anything, and there was never a deposit or collateral. they would still send you coins in return as long as they got the cash.

someone told me that bisq and haveno can’t have this because then people will just initiate orders they have no desire to fulfill, as a form of spam attack that locks the seller’s coins for a time, and that this is insurmountable without making the security deposit mandatory. but if localbitcoins and localmonero ran fine for years without this being a breaking problem, why isn’t it possible on bisq and haveno? and why can’t there be some other way to prevent spam like forcing the user to submit shares to a mining pool to prove that they are earnest? proof of work was invented to prevent spam.