Thou shalt not invest in anything thou doesn’t fully understand
To begin with, while you obviously want to know how to buy bitcoin, we encourage beginners to study as much as they can before buying bitcoin in serious amounts. To do this you can read our seminal piece that’s over 5,000 words: What Is A Bitcoin? or if that’s a bit much for you, we also have our shorter read: How Does Bitcoin Work For Dummies?
How To Buy Bitcoin
- Take A Minute To Educate Yourself: As said, we recommend studying bitcoin in proportion to the amount of bitcoin you’re buying. If you’re just wanting to learn and are starting off buying $100, it’s fine to start straight away. If you’re buying thousands or more, ensure you’ve at least spent a few hours understanding what you’re buying and how to safely store it
- Pick An Exchange: Choose from one of our top rated exchanges below. Our Crypto Exchanges Rating Methodology is fully transparent and built from the ground up to ensure you’re protected
- Download Or Register: Either download or sign up to your chosen exchange. Importantly, this shouldn’t require you to “verify your identity” (KYC/AML). This is explained in more detail below
- Buy Bitcoin Or Place An Offer: Once in the exchange interface, either take someones offer to sell bitcoin or create your own offer to buy bitcoin. Set your buy price and receive address
- Transfer Filthy Fiat: Once you’ve accepted an offer, you’ll receive details on where to send your fiat money to. This is usually transferred via normal payment methods like your bank account, Apple pay, a gift card code or other such forms
- Receive Your Bitcoin: Once the seller receives your payment, they will release the bitcoin to the receive bitcoin address you provided to them
As Bitcoin is a fully open protocol, there are literally thousands of ways to buy bitcoin. From in person with cash to online via gift cards to having your entire paycheck automatically paid in bitcoin. This huge diversity of bitcoin investment methods, while fantastic, can cause confusion among beginners when they buy cryptocurrency, so let’s go through each of them.
Buying Options
At this point most guides tell you to go to some big crypto exchange that pays them the biggest kick backs. That’s not how we do things around here. Instead, we prioritize your safety and privacy and are fully transparent on how we recommend exchanges. Also before buying one cent of bitcoin please go and read:
These two free pieces will help ensure you don’t fall down the wrong rabbit hole and include a number of critical safety measures, least of which is avoiding KYC/AML Crypto Exchanges.
Decentralized Exchanges (DEX)
The safest, best way to buy bitcoin in our opinion is using decentralized exchanges (DEX) which work by matching buyers and sellers up with each other. These types of exchanges don’t hold any user funds and instead simply operate as a way for everyone to come together and buy or sell bitcoin peer to peer.
Many of the best decentralized crypto exchanges are fully open source software (FOSS), don’t require any KYC or personal information, have cheaper trading and transaction fees plus can be much more private and safe as your data isn’t exposed to prying third parties.
Pros:
- Cheapest trading fees
- Non-KYC
- Private and secure
- Thousands of payment methods
- Takes seconds to begin trading
- No trusted third parties that can go bankrupt, steal or impair the asset
- No ongoing management fees
- Self-custodial wallet
- Can operate over Tor and E2EE
- Can be connected to your own full node
Cons:
- Lower liquidity
- Can take longer to perform the trade
- You are fully responsible for the security of the asset
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