//localbitcoins.com

The ritual was always the same. A ping on his phone would signal a new trade. He’d meet a stranger—sometimes a nervous techie, sometimes an idealistic libertarian—and they would perform the digital dance. Leo would initiate the escrow service to protect the transaction, the stranger would slide over a stack of bills, and with a final click, the satoshis would fly across the blockchain.

In the early, neon-tinted days of 2012, before Bitcoin was a household name or a ticker on CNBC, it lived in the shadows and the coffee shops. This was the era of , a platform that turned the digital abstract into something you could hold in your hand—usually in the form of a crumpled envelope of cash. //localbitcoins.com

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Leo was a pioneer of this "Buttonwood" style of trading, named after the legendary tree where the New York Stock Exchange was born. His office was a corner booth at a diner with spotty Wi-Fi. He didn’t look like a high-finance mogul; he wore a faded hoodie and carried a laptop held together by stickers. On the website, his profile was a beacon of "100% Trust" and "Quick Response." Leo would initiate the escrow service to protect