OP was not asking how to buy $1M worth of food. OP was asking how to trade large amounts at scale.

(It's amazing how inconsistent the skeptics are, when they are only trying to score some cheap points against what they don't like)

> amazing how inconsistent the skeptics are

Most people looking to trade large quantities of crypto have most of their wealth in other assets and expect to be able to convert between them, with the dollar as the default go-between.

This is true of practically every traded asset, including FX. It’s not true of e.g. MGM tokens. But that disparity highlights the difference between crypto and other traded assets.

That is anyway still beyond what was asked. The question was "how can anyone trade large amounts of crypto without a centralized exchange?"

Also, the fact that people currently use USD as "the default go-between" does not mean that people have to keep using it. Crypto OTC desks already exist.

> question was "how can anyone trade large amounts of crypto without a centralized exchange?"

OTC desks are the correct answer, not “why would you want to” use a dollar. Yes, in a hypothetical world people wouldn’t use dollars as a go between, but instead use [insert theme of the decade]. In reality, we do and will for the foreseeable future.

Also, a crypto OTC desk that doesn’t ask for KYC is by almost every country’s law laundering money. So it doesn’t sidestep the core issue of this post.

I am not even challenging the need for KYC, but I would challenge the expectation that USD will remain king for the foreseeable future.

If the idea is, like you said, just about being able to convert between different asset classes, we could have OTC desks that would be taking crypto and (after following proper KYC/AML regulations) giving you any of stock/bonds/real estate titles/commodities/etc, and vice-versa, without any need of USD as intermediary.

The only currency denomination that could work to evade the feds for a contract like what you're describing is CNY, which would basically require you to be Chinese and/or have a trusted party and be big enough to negotiate something like this. Maybe a couple thousand people in the world could do it

Who is talking about evading the feds?

Why else would you want to avoid transacting in USD?

- The exchange rate from USD <-> country where I live can be expensive

- Because every USD <-> local currency may have processing fees (credit cards on retail, withdrawal fees for large FX traders)

- Because some banks use the opportunity to slap tons of other fees

By holding crypto, one can legally avoid all of these costs.

I asked another poster who mentioned an OTC desk so I’ll ask here to. I have functionally no experience with crypto but am pretty well versed in traditional fx. The amount the op mentioned would be quite hard to trade otc unless you were doing it frequently (read daily) with a fx partner. It’s just too small an amount.

It’s almost exactly the use case you want for an exchange (or really in fx a consumer liquidity platform as they aren’t really traditional exchanges).

Is that different in the crypto world? If so why? All of the costs (ie risk management) seem more expensive in crypto than fiat.

Yes, however trading also implies the ability to liquidate positions and "cash out". Imagine a world in which a "stock trader" can exchange shares of one company for another but can never liquidate all of their positions and go to cash. Most people would not consider that to be stock trading at scale.