Anyone bought BitCoin?

We are in the game too - but buy and hold types. We've known about this since 2011 but did we buy then? No. How about 2013? Nope. Early this year? Are you kidding?

Other Half finally sorted a CoinBase account when we were on vacation in September. Best vacation souvenir ever that he bought some BTC one night in Cambria, CA when I was busy watching Airplane! or something like that. So at least we got in at $4K or whatever it was then.

I think we are up £500 or so on the initial stake, and just added on a recent dip. Not huge amounts of money but why not? Will likely diversify a bit in that asset class in the next few months, but NOT buy something like cryptokitties (seriously, WTF is that?!)

We know of a guy on a forum we frequent who was a big, early proponent of BTC. Everyone knows he bought when it was a few bucks each. Folks haven't heard from him in a while, so its assumed he is either celebrating his riches or been killed by the Chinese mafia

Ah nice work! How many bitcoins did you purchase? Is it easy to set up a coin base account?

Coinbase is what I use as well.  It's not difficult to set up an account, you just need to take a picture of your I'd.  It takes a few minutes to verify.

The hardest part is avoiding the fees, which can be pretty high.  I used my revolut card to transfer  Euros to them, and I should have used the sister site (Gdax) which has lower fees for buying and selling.  The two sites share the same back end so it's easy to transfer.

Bertine, it sounds like you guys have enough to move off of Coinbase.  Have you thought of using a hardware wallet?

I'm intrigued about the whole bitcoin purchase/sell process.

So which fees are this? So is the idea once you're happy with the bitcoin price you just convert back to dollars/euros?

When I bought my BitCoin, I paid €3 to Coinbase as a flat fee.  Later  I transferred some to a paper wallet to buy a coffee, this happened :

To answer your question, Coinbase is an exchange with a website and an app.  You have several wallets (dollar, euro, BitCoin, Ethereum, etc).  You can move money in and out of the euro and dollar accounts to your bank account or credit card at the touch of a button.

If you want to buy BitCoin, you specify that you would like to take money out of your € account and buy a certain amount of BitCoin.  Then the amount of BitCoin appears in your BitCoin account.  You can transfer this away and keep it somewhere else if you wish.  If you sell BTC, the money goes into your dollar or euro account and you can move it to your bank account or credit card if you like. 

I think there's plenty of other ways to do it but this way is expensive and simple.

Re: wallet - yeah I caught him looking at some snazzy looking souped up thumb drive thing the other night, so I think hes going to sort that out. Will probably move off Coinbase too though apparently that took ages to set up and get verified? Also there is some daily limit to what you can buy that is really low. Things to think about and fix over the holidays I imagine.

For kicks he put some app on our phones that buzzes when the price goes up or down 6% - phones were going off left and right all over the place a few weeks ago

Finally, is it just me or are the Winklevoss twins the luckiest bastards alive?

Your husband sounds like he's got it right.
But explain to me about the Winklevoss twins?

 OH just text today say we’re up 600 pounds

Metro just posted a video saying that the price was skyrocketing or something at present...I'm curious to know why....What would have caused that all of a sudden?

Also, there's a documentary I'm not sure if it was mentioned yet that's on Netflix called "Banking on Bitcoin". Thought people here might be interested if they've not heard it/seen of it.

It's up past 17,000 today.  My €175 is now worth €265. 

Kiss of death, the price is only going up because everyone wants to buy it because the price is going up.

It's up past 17,000 today.  My €175 is now worth €265. 

Kiss of death, the price is only going up because everyone wants to buy it because the price is going up.

Say you had a billion dollars worth of bitcoins - how would you withdraw it? Would you be able to withdraw it?

That depends on where they are stored.  My BitCoin are stored on an exchange, so I just press a button to turn them from BTC into euros or whatever. 

If you had them stored in a wallet of some type, you would have to transfer them to an exchange and then sell them.  I'm no expert, but I don't think there's any reason you can't transfer them straight to my wallet if I pay cash and we agree on a price.

Seems like it went up to £20,000 last night.  If you guys had just taken my advice, you would be rich!