And as you pointed out, it's more difficult to see what trades actually happen outside the LBC system. I still recall seeing trades that give you their contact information, where you can then just take discussions offline and still use cash without KYC. Those trades would have happened with escrow over LBC but now not anymore. So could be that it's not a case of people moving away from LBC, simply taking trades outside the system.
The problem is that it's now impossible to filter for local traders, and there is no way to search the "terms of trade" sections. I gave up trying to randomly search through offers since the chances of finding cash traders who were also local
and listed contact info was incredibly low.
And when it comes to purely online trades, the incentive to use their escrow service is really high due to fraud. For these reasons, I think that trading outside the escrow system is rare.
I really miss the old LocalBitcoins. It used to work just like Craigslist, with lots of people using it for local listings while dealing P2P outside of escrow. There's nothing "local" about it anymore. I've since moved on to LocalCryptos. It's nowhere near as active as the old LBC, but I managed to make one cash trade recently -- for a good price too.
