11 ms·

How to Buy Bitcoin

123 points by mmaunder 13y ago

pearjuice 13y ago
Regarding BTC-e and it being a shady site: no matter what they say it is the only exchange able to really properly trade into other currencies. Quick. I made a few thousand minute-trading between btc-ltc-ftc-nc et cetera. Got to love the bubble.
- dangero 13y ago
  What's wrong with: vircurex.com cryptsy.com
- mmaunder 13y ago
  Yes I agree. The lack of data makes it seem shady - that's really what I was trying to get across. But I use it and love it too. Love the range of currencies, the interface is very responsive, trades execute quickly and when I make a deposit I can trade within minutes after it's confirmed. Besides the Bulgaria jurisdiction and lack of data on who owns it, it's absolutely awesome.
- droidist2 13y ago
  What about Kraken for trading? They support a number of altcoins and a few fiat currencies (I believe USD, EUR, and KRW). They seem to be a whole lot less shady than BTC-E.
  - rms 13y ago
    Kraken has quite low volume
- taylorm 13y ago
  What exchange are you trading on?
jalev 13y ago
What about trying to buy Bitcoins from a country that isn't the US? I shouldn't have to send you the left arm of my first-borne to verify I'm a human being and then be limited to performing any transaction in dollars.
- pera 13y ago
  In Europe you may want to use Bitstamp, otherwise I would suggest you to buy through LocalBitcoins (as the blogpost says), or if you understand the concept of WoT then you can try with Bitcoin-OTC :)
- jafaku 13y ago
  You can use Virwox, but it's a bit expensive unless you live in Argentina. If you happen to live in Argentina, you can get the cheapest BTC on the world by buying with your credit card in Virwox.
  - martindale 13y ago
    Why is this?
    - umami 13y ago
      There is a ~24% gap between the price you pay in ARS for credit card purchases in USD and what the USD sells for in the black market. This opens up all sorts of arbitrage opportunities that the government struggles to plug. If you have USD in cash, you can sell them for close to 10 ARS and then buy BTC at about 7.34 exchange rate.
    - jafaku 13y ago
      Credit card purchases are charged the official USD exchange rate ~6 ARS + ~20% (the real exchange rate, or the one everyone accepts in the streets is ~10 ARS). The government will pay the difference for no logical reason, consider it an irrational player. And for even stranger reasons people don't realize this, and they also think Bitcoin is a scam, no matter what you tell them. Therefore nobody does this Virwox trick and it stays under the radar, undetected for years.
kyro 13y ago
For those who've been involved in this for some time: Do you think it's too late to get into mining Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) to make any significant payoff? I've been looking to get into Litecoin and others because I think I may have missed out on Bitcoin (and buying them at the current value just isn't feasible), and I'm trying to assess whether this bubble/trend/fad/craze will extend to other cryptocurrencies and if going in early now on them will be worth it. I know I'm asking you to look into a crystal ball, but anyone who's been in this game from early on knows much more than I do.
- fishtoaster 13y ago
  Mining bitcoin is thoroughly impractical. It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. The only effective way to do it is with specialized hardware built specifically for mining bitcoins. It's not too late to buy bitcoins, though: you don't need to buy a whole one. For example, if you think bitcoin will double in price over the next month, you can easily buy 0.1 bitcoins for about $100 and sell it next month for $200. One of the benefits of bitcoin is that it's highly divisible- the idea of "1" bitcoin doesn't really matter for most purposes. If Bitcoin becomes commonly used as an actual currency, people will almost never deal in whole bitcoins (any more than they would deal with $10k bills if they existed). You'd buy a loaf of bread with 0.0001 bitcoins, for example. So, if you think the trend/fad/craze will continue, you might as well buy fractions of a bitcoin. I can't speak to the alternate crypto currencies, though.
  - coin 13y ago
    > It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. This is outdated advice from the GPU mining days. ASIC miners use very little electricity compared the BTC that they generate.
    - xyzzy123 13y ago
      Technically, you're right; the electricity used over an ASIC miner's lifetime is very little. The OP has the right idea though, even though the reasoning is wrong. It actually comes down to whether your mining unit can cover its capital investment. If it weren't for the huge price increases, all the people who bought ASIC miners would be underwater right now. I have a 60GH/s BFL miner. It uses about 350W or so. The fans are LOUD. When I get home the room it's been running in is noticeably warmer. They don't generate as much BTC as one might think - just 0.04 / day at current difficulty and this is decreasing at a rapid clip (1 month ago or so it was 0.11 / day). As an aside, I've always wondered if one day all heating will be computational waste heat. You could almost give away ASICs (whether for mining or other purposes) to people in cold countries and subsidise their electricity when they run their heater...
kirchhoff 13y ago
Your blog breaks the back button with a redirect.
- mmaunder 13y ago
  Thanks. I tried to reproduce this in Chrome and Firefox but it works for me. I'm not using anything sneaky or that modifies browser history so not sure why you're seeing this. Which browser are you using?
  - dave809 13y ago
    This affects me too, firefox on linux
  - kirchhoff 13y ago
    Firefox on Windows with Adblock plus. Works on in Chrome. A below commenter mentioned ABP so it might be that.
- chaffneue 13y ago
  Are you using adblock plus by any chance? I had to switch to adblock to fix that on ars a while back.
matponta 13y ago
How is nobody come live with an effortless solution yet? I mean, credit card and go... ??
- RussianCow 13y ago
  Credit card transactions are reversible and the numbers are easy to steal, so it would be too easy to scam an exchange in this way. It's just as hard to convert local currency into any other currency, so it's not really unique to Bitcoin, and it probably won't get much more "effortless".
  - pmarca 13y ago
    All of which is ironic as it so clearly demonstrates the need for a system like Bitcoin!
  - NateDad 13y ago
    Except, that's how every store on the internet works, and they're doing fine.
    - im3w1l 13y ago
      It is easier to write anti-fraud algorithms for other goods: If you want to buy stuff and ship to Romania with a US credit card, that will raise a lot of read flags I'd imagine. You also have to resell the goods which is probably quite a hassle. There are of course a things that are almost as good as money, like gold and stuff, but the sellers of that probably have their algos set for very few false positives. Google anti fraud api, it is quite interesting.
      - mhitza 13y ago
        > If you want to buy stuff and ship to Romania with a US credit card, that will raise a lot of read flags I'd imagine I'd imagine that would be a shitty algorithm.
- TomGullen 13y ago
grey-area 13y ago
If you're just speculating on the price going up, and don't actually want to use coins to pay for something, it might be worth having a look at these charts before you do buy any: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zigDailyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zp http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zigDailyztgSzm... http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg730zigDailyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zp http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg730zigDailyztgSzm... by the time mainstream publications like the BBC are reporting on spectacular gains in an asset, it's far too late to invest speculatively in the hope of finding a greater fool and cashing out before the inevitable crash, even if you believe in the long-term future of this currency.
- peteretep 13y ago
  Disagree. When I can get a bank account with a UK bank denominated in bitcoin (at whatever cost), then it's too late to invest speculatively. Until then, the barriers to entry are exerting downward pressure on the price.
  - yaix 13y ago
    The current price hike is made in China. Better to look there for hints as to when the bubble will burst.
    - jackgavigan 13y ago
      +1. In my opinion, the Chinese government has effective control over the price of bitcoins right now. Obviously they can't dictate the price but, if they decide to restrict bitcoin trading, the price would plunge.
      - kolev 13y ago
        It would plunge temporarily, for sure, but not for long. Plus, why would the Chinese government do it?!
        13y ago
scotty79 13y ago
If you are from Europe you can buy some here: https://eur.bitcurex.com/ https://eur.bitcurex.com/ Polish version of this market was rock solid for last few years (still is): https://pln.bitcurex.com/ https://pln.bitcurex.com/
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
abjr 13y ago
Any decent guides on how to mine some of the altcoins like ppc, xpm, or qrk?
derengel 13y ago
so I have free electricity, can a machine built from commodity hardware for under $1000 USD be able to make one bitcoin a month?
- 3pt14159 13y ago
  Of course not.
philfreo 13y ago
Coinbase.com is by far the easiest to simply buy or use Bitcoin if you have a US bank account (and it is a YC company). Unlike MtGox.com (originally the most popular) the site is fast, stable, well designed, and can connect directly with your US bank account. They've also got a set of merchant tools and APIs. The only downside is that it's not a real time trading platform / you wouldn't want to do day trading of BTC on it. This link will give us both $5 in BTC if you buy 1 BTC. https://coinbase.com/?r=4fedfb2d6cbd3b0003000845&utm_campaign=user-referral&src=referral-link https://coinbase.com/?r=4fedfb2d6cbd3b0003000845&utm_campaig...
- zachlatta 13y ago
  Coinbase is nice, but dealing with their support is not a fun experience at all. For about a month they held about $2000 of my funds due to one of my purchases being marked as high-risk. Support took anywhere from three to five business days to respond to each email. I eventually got my money back after threatening with legal action. Would not do business with them again.
- hoers 13y ago
  good move
- epaga 13y ago
  In case you are European, I can highly recommend bitcoin.de for hassle-free, legit buying and selling of Bitcoin. Similar to Coinbase, they're less a day-trading platform and more a place to buy and sell Bitcoin within a few days. They have a partnership with a "real" German bank (Fidor) which makes them highly unlikely to have regulation issues any time soon. https://www.bitcoin.de/ https://www.bitcoin.de/
  - epaga 13y ago
    Interesting, a mod removed my referral URL (which I disclosed as being a referral URL). I'm absolutely fine with that, just wondering what the rules are re: referral URLs since other comments seem to be posting them without issues...
  - 13y ago
rickyc091 13y ago
Yep, I find coinbase really easy for buying / selling. Before coinbase, selling bitcoins was such a hassle... For buying, I use to just buy through blockchain.info, once you created a wallet, you could just put an amount you wanted to add in and run down to the nearest moneygram / western union. The process was fairly painless, took me 20 minutes. You type in the number of bitcoins you want, print out a piece of paper with instructions. Head down to moneygram or western union, follow the instructions of hand it to the person there, they do everything for you, you pay in cash. Refresh your bitcoin wallet and you should see your coins there shortly.
salient 13y ago
Any way to buy Bitcoins through a bank in Mexico? I can't find any. I'm surprised that even though Mexico is so close to US, there's still no practical way to buy Bitcoins yet (other than person to person).
koenbok 13y ago
Sometimes it's easy to buy Bitcoins with local payment methods. Here in the Netherlands you can buy them with ideal and receive them immediately: https://bitonic.nl/ https://bitonic.nl/

123 points by mmaunder 13y ago

Regarding BTC-e and it being a shady site: no matter what they say it is the only exchange able to really properly trade into other currencies. Quick. I made a few thousand minute-trading between btc-ltc-ftc-nc et cetera. Got to love the bubble.

dangero 13y ago
What's wrong with: vircurex.com cryptsy.com
mmaunder 13y ago
Yes I agree. The lack of data makes it seem shady - that's really what I was trying to get across. But I use it and love it too. Love the range of currencies, the interface is very responsive, trades execute quickly and when I make a deposit I can trade within minutes after it's confirmed. Besides the Bulgaria jurisdiction and lack of data on who owns it, it's absolutely awesome.
droidist2 13y ago
What about Kraken for trading? They support a number of altcoins and a few fiat currencies (I believe USD, EUR, and KRW). They seem to be a whole lot less shady than BTC-E.
- rms 13y ago
  Kraken has quite low volume
taylorm 13y ago
What exchange are you trading on?

jalev 13y ago

What about trying to buy Bitcoins from a country that isn't the US? I shouldn't have to send you the left arm of my first-borne to verify I'm a human being and then be limited to performing any transaction in dollars.

pera 13y ago
In Europe you may want to use Bitstamp, otherwise I would suggest you to buy through LocalBitcoins (as the blogpost says), or if you understand the concept of WoT then you can try with Bitcoin-OTC :)
jafaku 13y ago
You can use Virwox, but it's a bit expensive unless you live in Argentina. If you happen to live in Argentina, you can get the cheapest BTC on the world by buying with your credit card in Virwox.
- martindale 13y ago
  Why is this?
  - umami 13y ago
    There is a ~24% gap between the price you pay in ARS for credit card purchases in USD and what the USD sells for in the black market. This opens up all sorts of arbitrage opportunities that the government struggles to plug. If you have USD in cash, you can sell them for close to 10 ARS and then buy BTC at about 7.34 exchange rate.
  - jafaku 13y ago
    Credit card purchases are charged the official USD exchange rate ~6 ARS + ~20% (the real exchange rate, or the one everyone accepts in the streets is ~10 ARS). The government will pay the difference for no logical reason, consider it an irrational player. And for even stranger reasons people don't realize this, and they also think Bitcoin is a scam, no matter what you tell them. Therefore nobody does this Virwox trick and it stays under the radar, undetected for years.

kyro 13y ago

For those who've been involved in this for some time: Do you think it's too late to get into mining Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) to make any significant payoff? I've been looking to get into Litecoin and others because I think I may have missed out on Bitcoin (and buying them at the current value just isn't feasible), and I'm trying to assess whether this bubble/trend/fad/craze will extend to other cryptocurrencies and if going in early now on them will be worth it. I know I'm asking you to look into a crystal ball, but anyone who's been in this game from early on knows much more than I do.

fishtoaster 13y ago
Mining bitcoin is thoroughly impractical. It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. The only effective way to do it is with specialized hardware built specifically for mining bitcoins. It's not too late to buy bitcoins, though: you don't need to buy a whole one. For example, if you think bitcoin will double in price over the next month, you can easily buy 0.1 bitcoins for about $100 and sell it next month for $200. One of the benefits of bitcoin is that it's highly divisible- the idea of "1" bitcoin doesn't really matter for most purposes. If Bitcoin becomes commonly used as an actual currency, people will almost never deal in whole bitcoins (any more than they would deal with $10k bills if they existed). You'd buy a loaf of bread with 0.0001 bitcoins, for example. So, if you think the trend/fad/craze will continue, you might as well buy fractions of a bitcoin. I can't speak to the alternate crypto currencies, though.
- coin 13y ago
  > It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. This is outdated advice from the GPU mining days. ASIC miners use very little electricity compared the BTC that they generate.
  - xyzzy123 13y ago
    Technically, you're right; the electricity used over an ASIC miner's lifetime is very little. The OP has the right idea though, even though the reasoning is wrong. It actually comes down to whether your mining unit can cover its capital investment. If it weren't for the huge price increases, all the people who bought ASIC miners would be underwater right now. I have a 60GH/s BFL miner. It uses about 350W or so. The fans are LOUD. When I get home the room it's been running in is noticeably warmer. They don't generate as much BTC as one might think - just 0.04 / day at current difficulty and this is decreasing at a rapid clip (1 month ago or so it was 0.11 / day). As an aside, I've always wondered if one day all heating will be computational waste heat. You could almost give away ASICs (whether for mining or other purposes) to people in cold countries and subsidise their electricity when they run their heater...

kirchhoff 13y ago

Your blog breaks the back button with a redirect.

mmaunder 13y ago
Thanks. I tried to reproduce this in Chrome and Firefox but it works for me. I'm not using anything sneaky or that modifies browser history so not sure why you're seeing this. Which browser are you using?
- dave809 13y ago
  This affects me too, firefox on linux
- kirchhoff 13y ago
  Firefox on Windows with Adblock plus. Works on in Chrome. A below commenter mentioned ABP so it might be that.
chaffneue 13y ago
Are you using adblock plus by any chance? I had to switch to adblock to fix that on ars a while back.

matponta 13y ago

How is nobody come live with an effortless solution yet? I mean, credit card and go... ??

RussianCow 13y ago
Credit card transactions are reversible and the numbers are easy to steal, so it would be too easy to scam an exchange in this way. It's just as hard to convert local currency into any other currency, so it's not really unique to Bitcoin, and it probably won't get much more "effortless".
- pmarca 13y ago
  All of which is ironic as it so clearly demonstrates the need for a system like Bitcoin!
- NateDad 13y ago
  Except, that's how every store on the internet works, and they're doing fine.
  - im3w1l 13y ago
    It is easier to write anti-fraud algorithms for other goods: If you want to buy stuff and ship to Romania with a US credit card, that will raise a lot of read flags I'd imagine. You also have to resell the goods which is probably quite a hassle. There are of course a things that are almost as good as money, like gold and stuff, but the sellers of that probably have their algos set for very few false positives. Google anti fraud api, it is quite interesting.
    - mhitza 13y ago
      > If you want to buy stuff and ship to Romania with a US credit card, that will raise a lot of read flags I'd imagine I'd imagine that would be a shitty algorithm.
TomGullen 13y ago

grey-area 13y ago

If you're just speculating on the price going up, and don't actually want to use coins to pay for something, it might be worth having a look at these charts before you do buy any: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zigDailyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zp http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zigDailyztgSzm... http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg730zigDailyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zp http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg730zigDailyztgSzm... by the time mainstream publications like the BBC are reporting on spectacular gains in an asset, it's far too late to invest speculatively in the hope of finding a greater fool and cashing out before the inevitable crash, even if you believe in the long-term future of this currency.

peteretep 13y ago
Disagree. When I can get a bank account with a UK bank denominated in bitcoin (at whatever cost), then it's too late to invest speculatively. Until then, the barriers to entry are exerting downward pressure on the price.
- yaix 13y ago
  The current price hike is made in China. Better to look there for hints as to when the bubble will burst.
  - jackgavigan 13y ago
    +1. In my opinion, the Chinese government has effective control over the price of bitcoins right now. Obviously they can't dictate the price but, if they decide to restrict bitcoin trading, the price would plunge.
    - kolev 13y ago
      It would plunge temporarily, for sure, but not for long. Plus, why would the Chinese government do it?!
      - 13y ago

scotty79 13y ago

If you are from Europe you can buy some here: https://eur.bitcurex.com/ https://eur.bitcurex.com/ Polish version of this market was rock solid for last few years (still is): https://pln.bitcurex.com/ https://pln.bitcurex.com/

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

abjr 13y ago

Any decent guides on how to mine some of the altcoins like ppc, xpm, or qrk?

derengel 13y ago

so I have free electricity, can a machine built from commodity hardware for under $1000 USD be able to make one bitcoin a month?

3pt14159 13y ago
Of course not.

philfreo 13y ago

Coinbase.com is by far the easiest to simply buy or use Bitcoin if you have a US bank account (and it is a YC company). Unlike MtGox.com (originally the most popular) the site is fast, stable, well designed, and can connect directly with your US bank account. They've also got a set of merchant tools and APIs. The only downside is that it's not a real time trading platform / you wouldn't want to do day trading of BTC on it. This link will give us both $5 in BTC if you buy 1 BTC. https://coinbase.com/?r=4fedfb2d6cbd3b0003000845&utm_campaign=user-referral&src=referral-link https://coinbase.com/?r=4fedfb2d6cbd3b0003000845&utm_campaig...

zachlatta 13y ago
Coinbase is nice, but dealing with their support is not a fun experience at all. For about a month they held about $2000 of my funds due to one of my purchases being marked as high-risk. Support took anywhere from three to five business days to respond to each email. I eventually got my money back after threatening with legal action. Would not do business with them again.
hoers 13y ago
good move
epaga 13y ago
In case you are European, I can highly recommend bitcoin.de for hassle-free, legit buying and selling of Bitcoin. Similar to Coinbase, they're less a day-trading platform and more a place to buy and sell Bitcoin within a few days. They have a partnership with a "real" German bank (Fidor) which makes them highly unlikely to have regulation issues any time soon. https://www.bitcoin.de/ https://www.bitcoin.de/
- epaga 13y ago
  Interesting, a mod removed my referral URL (which I disclosed as being a referral URL). I'm absolutely fine with that, just wondering what the rules are re: referral URLs since other comments seem to be posting them without issues...
- 13y ago

rickyc091 13y ago

Yep, I find coinbase really easy for buying / selling. Before coinbase, selling bitcoins was such a hassle... For buying, I use to just buy through blockchain.info, once you created a wallet, you could just put an amount you wanted to add in and run down to the nearest moneygram / western union. The process was fairly painless, took me 20 minutes. You type in the number of bitcoins you want, print out a piece of paper with instructions. Head down to moneygram or western union, follow the instructions of hand it to the person there, they do everything for you, you pay in cash. Refresh your bitcoin wallet and you should see your coins there shortly.

salient 13y ago

Any way to buy Bitcoins through a bank in Mexico? I can't find any. I'm surprised that even though Mexico is so close to US, there's still no practical way to buy Bitcoins yet (other than person to person).

koenbok 13y ago

Sometimes it's easy to buy Bitcoins with local payment methods. Here in the Netherlands you can buy them with ideal and receive them immediately: https://bitonic.nl/ https://bitonic.nl/