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BitCoin - How does it work & Where do you cash in?
I am new to bitcoin and just read their guide on the website which states (if I got this correctly) you basicly create some bitcoin "wallet" at one of a lot of sites and then need to choose again from a lot of sites one that let's you top up your wallet (that rests with another provider?!) and once youve topped up your wallet you can pay everywhere where bitcoin is being accepted?
Also, can you recommend me some sites for bitcoin wallet & top up? I would prolly use paysafecard to top up as is the only prepaid card in germany rly..
Comments
I recommend advcash.com for bitcoin conversions.
I need to get into this bitcoin shit, been trying to avoid it for the longest time, but now it seems stupid to not have at least the basic knowledge of how it works and how to use it.
Same... I always think "well it is that anonymous paying thing, eh?". But a lot og legit shops are offering it, too and it spreads really fast it seems.
Currently, I have a cli wallet on my dedi and laptop. For purchasing bitcoin and selling bitcoin to IDR/Rupiah, there's a local bitcoin exchanger here, vip.bitcoin.co.id.
But I can also mine another altcoin, exchange it to bitcoin, and then sell it to IDR. Currency exchanger, now I only use Yobit.net, Cryptopia.co.nz, Bleutrade.com, and Bittrex
Lol at most I only understood half of this. Anyway those wallets you host them yourself so it isnt like various platforms who act as wallets where you login and manage your payments?
I just use an app called circle. If I want bitcoins it automatically takes money from my bank and converts it to BTC, then I can pay with a QR code or a BTC address & an amount. I can also sell BTC for current market price and they make a deposit to my bank. To receive payments, you just give them a wallet address / QR code generated by circle.
to host your own cli wallet it would take weeks or even months depends on the connection to sync with the network so I recommend you to use Electrum https://electrum.org/
which already has Two-Factor authentication and no need to wait for ages to sync with the network
Do any of your providers accept paysafecard EUR?
a wallet will probably not accept paysafecards since that's super expensive for them.
you do can try to trade your paysafecards on localbitcoins.com
but you won't get 100% the value of your card in BTC
Ahh i see.. although it seems quite surprising to me. wasnt the idea of bitcoin being anonymous? So if you top up wallet with your bank/paypal w.e. it can be tracked back to you..or am I missing the bigger picture?
Just visit the official website.
It explains everything about Bitcoin in great detail.
https://bitcoin.org/en/protect-your-privacy
I believe the idea of Bitcoin at heart was being a decentralized currency, instead of being an anonymous currency. All Bitcoin transactions are stored in a public blockchain, so everyone can track them, therefore it's not anonymous by default. It's anonymous enough in the sense people can't see names, just Bitcoin addresses. You can increase anonymity by using some "Bitcoin Mixers", but first, you need to understand how Bitcoin works
Generally you create a wallet. There are several kinds of wallets. For the sake of simplification I'm going to divide wallets in two categories: Online and Offline.
Online wallets are wallets like Coinbase, Xapo and alike. On these wallets you don't really own your Bitcoin addresses, the operating company (e.g.: Coinbase, Xapo) is the one that technically owns it. That being said, they could lock/take away your Bitcoins, though most beginners prefer these wallets due to the simplicity and ability to buy/sell Bitcoins in a very easy way by linking your Bank account.
Offline wallets are wallets where you control your Bitcoin private keys, so you have full control over your addresses. To buy/sell Bitcoins you would use a Bitcoin exchange (where you can trade your fiat money to Bitcoins and vice-versa). I recommend Kraken as you live in Europe.
I use Electrum (offline wallet), though there's also Copay (offline wallet) and many others I haven't tested. There are also some hybrid wallets like Blockchain.info, which are online wallets that don't hold your private keys (all operations are performed on the browser, thanks to JavaScript).
And you can forget buying Bitcoins with PaySafeCard, unless you're fine with a 20-30% fee. If you want to be "real anonymous" just buy Bitcoins the regular way and then use a Bitcoin Mixer to anonymise them :P
Yes, so my dedi wallet worked as "wallet", for receiving the coin. And if we want to send the money, we just need to issue the command from the cli, such : sendtoaddress 1btcxxx value
The problem is, we had to secure our dedi from unauthorized access (IP/user) so the wallet.dat won't be stealed
we use bitpay and they convert and deposit right to our bank account. have not had an issue yet.
Thanks for the thorough explanation
How do you find Circle to use/work with? They've been recommended to me as a good place to start and they have an electronic baking license thing in the UK, so looked about as legit as can be expected.
Found a nice tutorial over at hackforums. They have a loong faq there so you might wanna check it out @Nekki
I usually do the exchanges through https://localbitcoins.com as its escrow and the most safest with a lot of mediums for payment.
Works pretty well for me. I have made several deposits and transactions with Circle but as a general rule of thumb I don't keep more than $100 in btc or in paypal.
Cheers, I think I'd likely do something similar, no need to keep more than that in the wallet.
have been running a full node 24x7 since last December outbound bandwidth averages 800Gb per month servicing blockchain requests .. chart shows activity over past 24 hours
i like bitcoin so it's nice to be able to run a full node and keep the network decentralised
Coinbase has been really weird, they emailed and said they raised my limit to 0 dollarss.
But I can do 7k a week with Circle and I've never ever came close to that so I don't know why they'd let me. I keep some on trading platforms and let bots handle them but in the long run so far the returns have been nice.
Which bots do you use?
Eh, more strategy than bot except it does it automatically if I'm asleep. Stop loss at under 2400CNY and buy in at 2650 then hold is where I'm at and I ahven't done shit to it for a bit. I only play with CNY because I need to hold onto some of it in my account there but investments are jokes and my entire family pretty much pulled everything to the US, Canada, HK, and invested in Brazil and Africa and US. Generally I invest in value but in China you can't invest in value since the government makes that shit up and the people run with rumors. My friend actually gave me some ETH as a joke and "sorry I'm broke but I owe you money" type of deal about 7 or 8 months ago and that's sitting there too, but I mean the value is also bullshit so I'll just hold indefinitely, but definitely not buy. Chinese investments without any insider knowledge or party connection is pretty much throwing your money away for shits and giggles and since the really wealthy are all still trying to move their assets overseas as usual, even the legit assets, it's nothing new.
If you actually want to you know, play this for real and not as monopoly money, ETH is not huge in China yet (r mgiht never be, can't imagine how they'd say the name without it coming off bordering on hosptial-related or vulgar), but the inverse correlation is so small that I wouldn't put all my eggs in that basket. BTC's doubled in about 18 months for no good reason and honestly all you really need is to set an acceptable stop loss and sell when you get too nervous, because the ublic there has prtty much no strategy and people here seems to completely misunderstand how investing in China works - the inability for most foreigners to get into the market that actually matters a little - the shanghai A stocks - probably has something to do with that.
Also, I applied to Gemini on a lark and they wanted more documents than the BitLicensing reg even required, and then rejected me saying that my residency in NY disqualified me even though I'm also a NV resident and I have an LLC there, but I didn't want to point out to the guy who sounded official but obviously missed was told to bullshit or can't read that the same reg says that effectively trading on behalf of a foreign company is fine since my company is domiciled in NV and also, I can personally trade anyway because the last phrase is that, well, I can invest in nominal numbers (not nominal value). But that's basically how shit they're running their operation and really trading BTC is kind of a lark unless you put in some regulatory controls on the national level and separate it out like how China separates out their stock markets to the As and the Bs. China's been pushing vouchers pretty hard and I'd imagine if we don't do it they will. Whatever, outside of this the last time that particular bank account I had was used by my mom for er to date online so it's pretty close to play money as far as I'm concerned, although I'm also putting in a shit ton of docker full nodes just to see what it'd do if the they're all on IPs that I blatantly tried to sell as ladders on the chinese equivalent of this - heavily sponsored by EIG, incidentally.
The government won't let any investment hit a level that fucks up the social equilibrium, so at least you got that going.
WTF is this? ^
The Great Wall of Text
Tried Circle this morning, after initially having the transaction marked as fraud, I was able to load a few quid's worth into my wallet, fairly slick and straight forward, certainly easy enough for the wife to use.
We use bitpay for instant conversion. Easy to use and works great - fee's for business accounts are acceptable as well :-).
Just like mik997 in this thread, we're running a full node as well to support Bitcoin.
I personally see a future in bitcoins, and because of that we are more than happy to donate some hardware and bandwidth resources as "full node".
We see a slighly increase in bandwidth usage each month.
Cool to see the Bitcoin network growing! :-)
@Nekki
I purchased my first Bitcoins at Bit4Coin with PayPal as a payment method (bank transfer works also). 2 Days later you receive a giftcard. You dont pay any exchange fees or if only 5% which are debited from your total value^^ However for receiving the bit4coin giftcard (it only works with postal delivery) you always pay 1-3€.
Anyway I bought a 50€ giftcard and got about the same value in bitcoins
Cheers guy, this is all proving to be slightly trickier that I anticipated: Circle has subsequently frozen my account to do ID verification (which takes 3-5 days apparently), and trying to buy privately hasn't been a roaring success. I'll have a look at this if Circle don't sort my account shortly.