Buying bitcoins

scamalert wrote: »

one more question,how do i calculate fee ?since by default on etherum wallet i see fee is set to 10% slider in the middle ,and also if sending amount does the fee come out of the sent amount.since theres few mentions in docs to increase fee in case it gets stuck etc,but whats appropriate rate when sending sub 100$£e amounts,to make them pass smooth.

For fees - look at the price in BTC per KB and apply that to the size of your transaction:

https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx

Looking at that, I wouldn't be in a hurry to pay more than 0.00130 BTC per Kb. Really, you don't want a fee with a big chunk of grey in it.

The fee comes out of your remaining balance, not the amount you send.

Where / how do you buy it?

Grumpypants wrote: »

I just used coinbase.

I set up the account to buy bitcoin and noticed they trade ETH too. Didn't know much about it, at the time it was about €7. So I went off to spend a few days reading up on it. In that time the price went up around 20% so I bought 5. A few weeks later it was still tracking along nice and stable so I got another 5.

It was very much a small gamble on this being the "next Bitcoin". I said I'll stick €100 worth in the wallet and leave it there, in 5 years if it is worth €1000 I'll be delighted if not I haven't lost much.

Because it isn't yet another crypto currency that would boom and bust, but rather the focus is the underlying tech there was a good chance it would tip along long term.

Start of March it shot up and went from €12 to €40.

its obvious after btc success that people want to create alternatives and have same success as with btc,while dont imagine btc being whole cypto curency future think all the flaws and good it has,will be used as main background in creating perfect currency at some stage in time.That said dont think btc will go anywhere soon since it has its market,as in where people accept it as means of pay,and are able to change it to fiat when needed,thus foundation is there.As for buying other crypto currencies its low risk,since eventually people might want to diversify,so think theres potential for other currencies to have its own space,thus if you can spare some money and not be worried for foreseeable future then why not,since its clear you made some profit already thus,as per my years of being wrong you'd never know if it will amount to nothing or will be next best thing you could made your decision on.

makeorbrake wrote: »

@scamalert: low risk? Surely other cryptos are just as risky /volatile as btc?

What do people see as the up n comming cryptos and what advantage do they have over btc?

If you have Coinbase I would highly recommend ETH. You can also trade ETH for BTC and BTC to Fiat. I would also recommend staying away from anything else due to how easily they can be exploited as a programmer you cannot go wrong with the ETH and BTC underling technology. ETH should be E60 - E80 and BTC E1700 - E2000 (Might actually deep to < 900 with the current turmoil with BU and Roger) by the end of the year due to scaling and availability.

DeSelby83 wrote: »

Do you know of anywhere else to buy Ethereum?

www.poloniex.com is the "go to" exchange for buying/selling/trading all altcoins -- including ethereum. Straightforward and easy and fast to set up an account.

pro_gnostic_8 wrote: »

There's no doubt that the world has a few more millionaires this morning due to the humongous increase in Ethereum price. Not only ETH, but Monero, Dash and all the major altcoins have experienced massive spikes. But has the price already peaked, I wonder? Have people who have not bought-in over the past week missed the train?

There certainly has been some outflow ofmoney from bitcoin and into the other crypto's. But is it all a bubble?
Over on r/ethtrader it is like tulipmania.

Poloniex or Gdax - At one point Ethereum was over 100% I had cash in my profit and start the run again. It was a fantastic week

Nearly $2 billion has been wiped off bitcoin’s value in three days all because of a fork
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/17/bitcoin-price-blockchain-fork-ethereum.html

My understanding is that Monero's U.S.P. is that it is truly (??) anonymous whereas bitcoin (whilst it started out to be suggested to be anonymous....) is far from it. If that's true, then I'd imagine it's likely that Monero will become more popular on the deep web....but then, that's a limited arena - and it's professed (whether accurate or otherwise??) that Bitcoin has outgrown dependency on that type of use - with a shade more of general adoption.

What U.S.P's have 'dash' and 'ethereum' got? Bitcoin has first mover advantage. In order to catch up (and/or surpass), the other crypto's are going to have to present a decisive advantage/improvement.

I'm at a loss to understand what that advantage is. Does anyone have the knowledge?

pro_gnostic_8 wrote: »

www.poloniex.com is the "go to" exchange for buying/selling/trading all altcoins -- including ethereum. Straightforward and easy and fast to set up an account.

i set up an account here but how do i actually buy it?

jobless wrote: »

i set up an account here but how do i actually buy it?

Jobless, you need to first deposit some bitcoin ( or fraction thereof) to your account. Then click the "Exchange" tab, and proceed to the altcoin you wish to buy or sell.
Poloniex is a peer-to-peer Exchange-- a facility for converting bitcoin into other cryptocurrencies and vice versa. Fiat money -- euro sterling or dollars -- is not a constituent of its infrastructure.

pro_gnostic_8 wrote: »

Jobless, you need to first deposit some bitcoin ( or fraction thereof) to your account. Then click the "Exchange" tab, and proceed to the altcoin you wish to buy or sell.
Poloniex is a peer-to-peer Exchange-- a facility for converting bitcoin into other cryptocurrencies and vice versa. Fiat money -- euro sterling or dollars -- is not a constituent of its infrastructure.

Oh right thanks... I'm at the stage where I'm trying to buy my first bitcoin

jobless wrote: »

What would a fork mean? Two versions of bitcoin?

Precisely!
But both versions would each have less value than before. You would have Bitcoin Unlimited supporters selling their "old" BTC because they don't support it anymore and to drive down its price; then you would have Bitcoin Core supporters (SegWit) selling their "new" bitcoin-unlimited bitcoins for the same reasons. A war of attrition and a race to the bottom.

Also,of course, in the outside world a hard fork would cause major upset -- which version would merchants/businesses decide to accept? And for the ordinary Joe who has enough trouble already trying to understand Bitcoin, he would now have to figure out this added confusion of "two differet Bitcoins". It would/will be very bad PR for the Bitcoin brand.

RealistSpy wrote: »

This to my believe is why many investor are diversifying into other crypto currencies like Ethereum.

I also personally believe BTC is the best way to go instead of Bitcoin Unlimited (BTU) especially the fact that BTC developers are said to be more competent than BTU. BTU is also said to have higher chances of being exploited.

I fully agree with all the above!
Bitcoin Unlimited is driven by Chinese miners motivated by profit alone. It is contentious, has vulnerabilities and could be the beginning of the end for decentralization of the bitcoin network.

Some good and some bad news this evening. Twenty bitcoin exchanges have issued a statement that they expect a hard fork to come and have put in place contingency plans for this eventuality.
The good news ( seems to me anyway, reading the report) is that when the hard fork happens that they (these exchanges) will list Bitcoin Unlimited as an altcoin, thus denying BU the kudo of calling itself BITCOIN. This is a blow to the Bitcoin Unlimited pushers which may make them rethink their plan to force BU on the world.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-exchanges-unveil-emergency-hard-fork-contingency-plan/

Maybe at the start it would be easier to mine, but then the blockchain automatically readjusts the level of network difficulty to target a new block generated every ten minutes.
The difficulty level is adjusted every 2016 blocks, so after a week or so, yeah, the miners would find it as tough as is now to grind out new blocks.

zulutango wrote: »

All the FUD made me jittery yesterday so I decided to take a chance and offload all my btc. And then it plummeted. This is a scary ****ing rollercoaster.

well look at bright side,some shake down on price is good,coins like eth and many others got some boost,that said from purely profit investing point whoever cleared at 1200,surely will start buying back at 800 or so.
that said dong get the difference between fork and btc unlimited is it same,how would everyone get new bu coins,and what impact it has.

on brighter side tried to mine some eth yesterday,it was like pissing against wind,whole setup took few hours to figure and once done that since gpu is to weak to mine it at all tried using cpu pool mining,and pool didnt even pick it up on bright side my OCed cpu from 3.2Ghz runs at 3.8,but while mining it hit 4.5 :eek: and didnt break sweat at steady 55celsius,smth that i had to double check to believe.

point of that being wonder any crypto left that still is possible to mine with regular pc,since looking at whattomine.com seems few dozens coins out there,from nonesne like trump coin ,to some that seem like a joke or just simple knock off of more popular crypto.

edit:also understand that btc developers have full power to split it or do fork or whatever they would see fit,thus whole voting seems a bit orchestrated off ,since they could implement it and miners would have to get on with it,since from few articles ive read that unlimited? would void many transfer fees and would provide mainstream number for btc,which many complain being lack off,since influx could drive price down and eventually stabilize where such fluctuations like 10-20% would be rare.

scamalert wrote: »

,that said from purely profit investing point whoever cleared at 1200,surely will start buying back at 800 or so.

I'd be slow enough to buy back in. The hard fork situation has really raised serious questions for bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general. Those questions need to be answered before the market has confidence again.

makeorbrake wrote: »

Never a dull moment with BTC :-)

Indeed ! Not recommended as a "play" for anyone of a nervous disposition or with a dicky heart.

I understand the argument against BU. What criticism exists against segwit as a solution to the scalability issue?

It is a very complex upgrade and will take time for miners and mercantile companies to upgrade and incorporate it. In the meantime, if your wallet is not upgraded, you will not be able to spend coin received from a Segwit-enabled transaction.
It is seen by some as only a temporary fix to the scaling problem. We may have to go thru' this all again in the future.
Saying this, I do honestly think it is the best solution we have ............ at the present time.

Also, as someone else has already asked, in the event of a hard fork, how do you end up with the division? i.e. associated with different addresses or how does that work?

Two separate blockchains. You will have coin on each with the same private key but different addresses.

Lastly, for those of us who are playing the longer game, if you ride it out, can you actually end up on the wrong end - given that you'll hold equal amounts of both...?

Aha, the million-dollar question. Who knows. Maybe you will end up on the wrong end; maybe you won't. Will your total BTU and BTC combined be worth more collectively than your current BTC only? Possibly, .......... or possibly not.

whats the best place to buy bitcoin online and have it more or less straight away?

BTC recovering again - not back to where it was but respectable enough.

How long do we have until the fork is likely to happen? Do we get notice - or do we just wake up one morning and it's already happened?

anyone open a coinbase account using a webcam to upload your id?... wont seem to accept my id so wondering how others have opened one?

scamalert wrote: »

if your after the wallet go with electrum as suggested by most here,providing details to third parties like coinbase seems major pain in the but for simple task,if you want to trade daily look up other suggested exchanges few pages back where email and sms number gives you access,if you want trade it on daily basis.

Intresting enough no one spoke of fork before etf approval,now somehow it became an issue,in theory btc moves a lot like any other instrument,since denial of approval sent it down few hundred bucks,and it restored in hours,yet few days later now its slowly selling down.Not sure how or when the fork if at all will be implemented but looks a lot like market speculation,which given price drop if it goes below 1000 will start attracting buyers again ,then again one could only guess reasons why its behaving like that since nothing really changed.

thanks, not looking for a wallet as i have one...just an easy way to buy.... ideally somewhere that i could use credit card pretty quickly.... im a complete noob so things like buying from forums using escrows ive no idea about...

trixiebust wrote: »

Have you tried localbitcoin ? Noob myself, used twice already for small amounts and had no problems.

Paid by bank transfer, and had them within the hour.

no havent, just looked there... are most people charging a premuim here?... i see some selling a bit over the market price