ThisOldGuy I don't understand fiat unless you mean the car brand?
Fiat means state issued currency like USD, Euro, Yen, etc.
ThisOldGuy So without kraken I can't buy XMR and I need another cex to buy a different coin from and then convert it?
Correct. You can't buy XMR directly from USD (fiat), so you need to buy Litecoin and then convert it to Monero.
ThisOldGuy Why doesn't other cex have XMR to buy?
XMR is private. The banking system is completely not private by law. Every transaction in the banking system (credit cards, banks, venmo, etc) is recorded for at least 5 years, shared with 100s of different third parties, shared with the government, evaluated on risk scores by AI.
So a CEX, which has to be regulated because their jurisdiction is in the USA and they deal in fiat, they see this money coming in with a completely opaque history. The important thing for them is that they know where the money came from because of taxes and anti-money laundering.
XMR is frequently used by cybercriminals and drug dealers to launder money, so it has a bit of a bad name. Obviously, as GrapheneOS users, we understand that privacy has to be for everyone, and it is unfortunate that unethical actors use privacy tools, but there's no way to stop it without compromising the tool for journalists, activists, regular people.
So, other CEXs have just decided to just delist it to avoid all that headache. Not sure why Kraken has chosen not to. Is it a coincidence that they are considered the most trustworthy CEX and also haven't delisted XMR in the USA? Idk, but I sure as hell appreciate that they list it and they get a lot of respect from the Monero community for that.
Kraken has been forced to delist XMR in Canada, Australia, and the EU by those governments. So it's not like they break the law.
Or find a friend in another state and ask them to buy for me and transfer or is that a no-no?
Yeah, I don't see why that would be a problem. It's not like Monero is banned. It's totally legal.
I wouldn't do that because you'd have to explain at least a decent amount of this to your friend, and they'd have to KYC. If you have a friend that already has any crypto, bitcoin, ethereum, anything, and they'd be willing to sell you some for fiat that you sent them check, venmo, etc. That would be the best way because you wouldn't have to complete any additional KYC, but I wouldn't want to ask a friend to sign up for Kraken just to get XMR, when there's the easier way for me to do it.
I've been speaking a lot about KYC. When I first got into Monero, I didn't really see why people focused on it so much(There's whole websites dedicated to no-KYC. https://kycnot.me is a good one. But basically, people don't like KYC because there's that chance of identity breaches and people don't like to get permission to use their money. That's the whole point of crypto, permission-less money.