Bit Coins

What Can You Buy with Bitcoin? After an initial flurry of interest among merchants in accepting  bitcoin  in their retail or online stores, interest has largely died down as increasing bitcoin transaction fees and volatile price movements made it less attractive as a means of exchange That doesn’t mean that there are no outlets to spend your bitcoin, however, far from it. It’s just that bitcoin volumes at these outlets has generally not met expectations, and by the time you read this, some may have discontinued that option. At time of writing, however, you can still buy a wide range of goods and services with the cryptocurrency. Among the advantages of doing so are the ease of cross-border transactions, and anonymity (unless you want physical delivery, of course). By accepting bitcoin, merchants get access to a broader market, and don’t have to worry so much about chargebacks (where the buyers cancels the payment after receiving the product). If you want to use ...

How to Sell Bitcoin These days virtually all the  methods available  to buy  bitcoin  also offer the option to sell. The exception is bitcoin ATMs – some do allow you to exchange bitcoin for cash, but not all.  Coinatmradar  will guide you to bitcoin ATMs in your area. All exchanges allow you to sell as well as buy. What type of exchange you choose to sell your bitcoin will depend on what type of holder you are: small investor, institutional holder or trader? Some platforms such as  GDAX  and  Gemini  are aimed more at large orders from institutional investors and traders. Retail clients can sell bitcoin at exchanges such as  Coinbase ,  Kraken ,  Bitstamp ,  Poloniex , etc. Each exchange has a different interface, and some offer related services such as secure storage. Some  require verified identification  for all trades, while others are more relaxed if small amounts are involved. (...

How to Store Your Bitcoin Before owning any  bitcoin , you need somewhere to store them. That place is called a “ wallet .” Rather than actually holding your bitcoin, it holds the private key that allows you to access your bitcoin address (which is also your public key). If the wallet software is well designed, it will look as if your bitcoins are actually there, which makes using bitcoin more convenient and intuitive. Actually, a wallet usually holds several private keys, and many bitcoin investors have several wallets. Wallets can either live on your computer and/or mobile device, on a physical storage gadget, or even on a  piece of paper . Here we’ll briefly look at the different types. Electronic wallets Electronic wallets can be downloaded software, or hosted in the cloud. The former is simply a formatted file that lives on your computer or device, that facilitates transactions. Hosted (cloud-based) wallets tend to have a more user-friendly interfa...

How Can I Buy Bitcoin? So you've learned the  basics about bitcoin , you’re excited about the potential and now you want to buy some*. But how? (*Please, never invest more than you can afford to lose – cryptocurrencies are volatile and the price could go down as well as up.) Bitcoin can be bought on exchanges, or directly from other people via marketplaces. You can pay for them in a variety of ways, ranging from hard cash to credit and debit cards to wire transfers, or even with other cryptocurrencies, depending on who you are buying them from and where you live. 1 – set up a wallet The first step is to set up a wallet to  store your bitcoin  – you will need one, whatever your preferred method of purchase. This could be an online wallet (either part of an exchange platform, or via an independent provider), a desktop wallet, a mobile wallet or an offline one (such as a hardware device or a  paper wallet ). Even within these categories of wallets...

What is Bitcoin? To cut through some of the confusion surrounding bitcoin, we need to separate it into two components. On the one hand, you have bitcoin-the-token, a snippet of code that represents ownership of a digital concept – sort of like a virtual IOU. On the other hand, you have bitcoin-the-protocol, a distributed network that maintains a ledger of balances of bitcoin-the-token. Both are referred to as “bitcoin.” The system enables payments to be sent between users without passing through a central authority, such as a bank or payment gateway. It is created and held electronically. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by computers all around the world, using free software. It was the first example of what we today call cryptocurrencies, a growing asset class that shares some characteristics of traditional currencies, with verification based on cryptography. Who created it? A pseudonymous software developer going by the name of  Sa...