Are many ways to get Bitcoins. I like to start from what I have tried and what I use.
Today the best working and most common way for me is to buy Bitcoins at exchange. If it is not about purchase of your first bitcoin and not about buy of coins for 5-20$ and not about getting bitcoin within 5 minutes and not about the only one and last purchase, then I definitely recommend to think about creating your account at exchange.
Most often I use Kraken (www.kraken.com). I do simple SEPA payment (from Europe) what cost me 0.41€(0.5$) and usually after 1.5 working days I have money at my account at Kraken. Then I can buy coins using very simple form
In block A I can see amount of money or BTC I have. In block B I see fee that I pay to exchange. Fee depends on amount of my sales. Fee is less than 0.3% what is really nice. Just note, that when you buy by other methods, you may pay 3-20% bigger fee, so 0.3-0.2% is good one.
In block C I can tell how much coins I like to buy, or I can switch and tell how much money I like to spend for purchase (i.e. I can buy for 100€)
Then in block D I can specify price. By default Kraken offers price for last deal. But usually I discount that price by some 0.1-0.5€ when I buy and add similar premium when I sell. Kraken is an exchange where price goes up/down. So discount allow me to get better price within 3-20 minutes after I submit an order.
Then I press Submit order and I have my coins on my account after few minutes or seconds of waiting.
If you do occasional sales/purchase up to 2’000$ , Kraken do not ask you to do a lot of verification. You need just to fill simple form with your personal data.
Bigger amounts will require more strong verification (provision of scanned documents to prove your identity + documents that may prove your residence). Kraken accepts documents with watermark. You can add watermark if you like to be sure that document will not be used even if stolen.
Kraken have nice online support. I had issue when by mistake I did deposit that was bigger than my daily limit. Issue was solved fast with help of online chat with Kraken.
Kraken have about 7% of exchange market (that is quite a lot) and in my opinion is probably most efficient place to buy BTC with Euros. I have not seen how big is market share of Kraken in changing of USD/BTC or GPB/BTC, but for EUR/BTC it works nice.
If you have a bit more time and can wait 3-10 hours, look on values of HIGH and LOW and set your price not equal LAST, but closer to LOW. In some days it may allow you to safe 2-8$ on each BTC you purchased. Also you may look CHART to see what is current price.
On this example, people who sold at 308€ got money fast but potentially “lost” 1.5€ as price went bak to 309 in next few minutes. So if we look picture above and have a bit of time, reasonable (in my opinion) to place purchase order at 308.3€ or sell order at 308.55€. We may have coffee and in meantime (in next 20min-1h) such order probably will be done.
To withdraw purchased coins we use Funding->Withdraw->Bitcoin steps from menu.
If you do small purchase have in mind – withdraw cost you 0.0005BTC.
P.S. If you like and plan to use Kraken longer or plan to leave bigger amounts at Kraken, please spend time and setup 2FA authentication. This will effectively secure your account.
Today I leave for later posts such topics like how to buy my first bitcoin, how to buy coin with my VISA or Mastercard and what is best exchange. But hope that information above was useful and helpful.
Thank you in advance for your comments and have a nice trading!
Good Article Andrej.
The Bitcoin you bought is at Kraken in your account. Do you need to transfer it to your bitcoin wallet or not? Can you transfer to any bitcoin wallet? I am thinking of Microsoft bitcoin wallet for example.
Hi. If you bought coins not to sell in 2-3 days, then most of experts will recommend to withdraw coins from all exchanges to own wallet. That makes coins controlled by you. also, in case of forks or airdroped tokens, you will get forked coins with your own wallet, but not always will get it when coins stay on exchange.
I never heard about Microsoft wallet. Never at all. I doubt if I will use microsoft wallet. Look https://www.exodus.io/ or https://electrum.org/#home . Both are known and safe (at least till this moment)