Localbitcoin.com started in 2012. It is the world largest peer-to-peer (p2p) Bitcoin trading platform with over 1 million registered users from 249 countries. On Local Bitcoins, you can trade bitcoins for traditional currencies through person-to-person trades. This is also known as over-the-counter (OTC) trading. People prefer to buy and sell bitcoins OTC because it allows for fast transactions and more diverse payment methods. This creates a better user experience for the customer.
Hundreds of Bitcoin traders from all over the world already earn a living trading bitcoins on LocalBitcoins using more than 60+ payment methods.
How can you benefit from trading on Local Bitcoins
Africans can benefit from becoming traders on Local Bitcoins as the Bitcoin transaction volume has doubled during the past 12 months in Africa. However, a number of active traders in most African countries is very low. This enables new users who want to sign up and start offering their service to exchange bitcoin into local currency or to exchange local currency into Bitcoin a great earning opportunity.
Local Bitcoins also provides escrow protection for safe trading and thereby protecting both the buyer and the seller and users are further protected in that there is a reputation system for finding and filtering trustworthy customers.
The Trading Process
- You need to create a sell bitcoins online advertisement (called an online sell advertisement). When making the advertisement you choose a payment method, set your pricing, your limits and write your terms of the trade as a free-form message.
- Then you need to fund your Local Bitcoins wallet with Bitcoin. You need to have bitcoin in your LocalBitcoins wallet in order for customers to be able to open trade requests from your advertisements.
- When a buyer opens a trade with you, the bitcoins for the full amount of the trade are automatically taken from your wallet into escrow. Give the buyer payment instructions and guide the buyer through paying for the trade. You will receive email and SMS notifications when someone replies to
your advertisement. - Once the buyer has paid and pressed the Mark payment complete button you will receive a notification via e-mail, SMS and on the website that a trade has been paid for.
- When you've confirmed that you have received the payment, it's time for you to release the bitcoins. The bitcoins are then moved from escrow to the buyer's Local Bitcoins wallet.
- The final step is to leave feedback for the buyer and encourage the buyer to do the same for you. Feedback is important in order to gain reputation and make more trades.
Advertisement/Trade Requirements
You need to set a location, currency, payment method, price,
limits and write terms of trade.You need to have at least 0.4 BTC in your LocalBitcoins
wallet for your advertisements to be shown publicly.You can create up to 5 advertisements at a time. For each Bitcoin you trade during 30 days you can create one additional advertisement.
How to generate a profit as a Local Bitcoins market maker/trader
The way you make money by offering to sell bitcoins for local currency or to buy Bitcoin for local currency is through arbitrage. Arbitrage refers to buying at one price and then selling it higher somewhere else immediately after.
For example, let's say you are based in Nigeria and the current price of Bitcoin is at around NGN 1,000,000 per Bitcoin you can choose to offer to sell NGN10,000 – NGN100,000 worth of bitcoin at NGN1,070,000 per bitcoin but you are actually able to buy the bitcoin on a global Bitcoin exchange for the USD-equivalent of NGN1,020,000, you can make NGN50,000 trading profit risk-free. This is how most traders on Local Bitcoins earn their income. Through (almost) riskless arbitrage. And as there are so few traders on Local Bitcoins in Africa, you can charge whatever rates you want, provided you can find people willing to pay those prices.