I am very genuinely curious how people bought bitcoin before coinbase? There was that vending machine. Or you could mine it. But how did regular folks do it?

I did a wire transfer to bitstamp from my girlfriend's French bank account. Wouldn't work from my british bank account for whatever reason.

(This was in 2013. I bought my first bitcoin at $55 a piece, annoyingly I only invested ~$100 at the time :/)

I also used Bitstamp and had to shop-around UK banks until I found one that would authorise the transaction. Most declined once they identified the recipient as dealing in cryptocurrency.

Halifax were happy to do so though, also 2013.

Local bitcoins. I met up, btc were held in escrow, paid in cash, got the escrowed bitcoins released to me.

Curious how you decided to trust a particular escrow service. With Coinbase, the leap of faith one could possibly make was that they were associated with YC (gave them credibility in my books at least).

It was mostly what everybody was using on Reddit and the recommended method of aquiring BTC at the time. Before exchanges, some sort of trust would have been necessary for any BTC <-> $ exchange, and even now, trust is necessary in the exchange itself.

I do believe the technological possibility is baked in BTC for 3-way signing a transaction so that a validation requires 2 sources of signature. You could implement an escrow system this way.