A beginners guide to buying bitcoin and alt coins FAST – in under an hour!

Once you make the decision to buy some crypto currency, the question then becomes, where can you buy it and how quickly can you get your hands on it? The most common way to buy and sell bitcoin and smaller “alt coins”, (like litecoin and ripple), is to set up an exchange account. If you’re in Australia, Coinspot (https://www.coinspot.com.au/ ) is a good option and easy use, although the fees are a little high. If you’re in Europe or the UK, Bitstamp (https://www.bitstamp.net/ ) is well established, but frustratingly their customer service isn’t great and there’s only a small selection of coins to buy. The exchanges allow you to deposit bitcoin or flat currency like USD/AUD etc into your account which can be used to buy crypto currency. You can either leave the crypto currency you buy on the exchange or you can withdraw it and store it in an online ‘wallet’, or the safest option is to store it on an offline hardware wallet like Ledger Nano S, which looks like a USB key. More information about protecting your crypto can be found here https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

Most exchanges require you to verify your account by providing ID documents and a proof of address etc. Once submitted, it can take what feels like a life time to get approved and get up and running buying crypto. Increasing demand on the crypto exchange websites during the last month has pushed back verification times significantly and some exchanges are taking up to a month to verify. Whilst you’re waiting, the coin you had your eye on could have increased in value by thousands of % – not ideal. Timing really is everything with purchasing crypto. On top of verification times, if you want to deposit money into your account in order to buy crypto, it can takes days for a bank transfer to go through and there can be issues with the bank rejecting the payments. I had to call my bank 3 times to get a payment to go through!

Here’s my top tips for owning crypto pain-free in under an hour:

Sign up to an exchange that allows trading prior to (or without) verifying your account such as Binance (https://www.binance.com/ ). Binance allows you to deposit bitcoin buy/sell other smaller alt coins and withdraw up to 2 bitcoins per day without verification, or pending your account verification. Instant trading. Boom!
Binance has a large range of coins to buy and most ICO’s*are on there. Bitfinex is another exchange option (https://www.bitfinex.com/ ) that allows you to buy and sell bitcoin and alt coins prior to verification, but it has a smaller range of coins compared to Binance and its user interface is more complicated to use.

Deposit bitcoin into your exchange fast using cash at a bitcoin atm. It’s incredibly simple;

(1) scan your bitcoin deposit address (which can usually be found in the deposit tab in the exchange websites);
(2) insert cash
(3) press send and take a photo of your receipt!

It usually arrives in your exchange wallet within 30 minutes! Locate your nearest bitcoin atm here https://coinatmradar.com/

The downside of buying your bitcoin through an atm is that the fees are quite high (usually around 5%) and you don’t always get offered the best bitcoin rate. But at least you’re up and running on the same day and hopefully making money on your coins! If you want to sell the crypto you’ve bought and make withdrawals in AUD, USD etc. just bear in mind that you usually need to verify your account. I recommend that you check the terms and conditions of the exchange and the verification rules before signing up to make sure that you think you’ll meet the criteria. Coinspot for example requires an Australian drivers license as ID and at the time of writing, they wouldn’t accept an Australian passport as alternative.

If you want to find out what crypto is available to buy, or track prices, volume, market caps – I recommend this website to keep an eye on things https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/ .

*ICO stands for initial coin offering. These are new coins to the market which seek to raise development funds by selling the currency – it’s the equivalent of an IPO in the share market. These new coins can be even riskier to invest in, as they often in the very early stages of development. However, there can also be a great opportunity to make a profit quickly as the good ones tend to have meteoric increase in price. Interesting recent ICO’s if you want to read more include; Verge, EOS and POWR and you can find stats for them here https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/