Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys, quite new to this cryptocurrency thing.
How should I proceed if i ever manage to have high profits in BTC, lets say 30BTC, and i want to convert it back to Euros.
What do you guys think is the best way to do it and active/passive safety measures should one take at all times.

Thanks! Sorry if kinda messy questions

First safety and security measure I can think of is to not store them in an exchange , you should withdraw them directly to a wallet where you control the private keys , for such a big amount I'd go with a Hardware wallet , until you decide to sell them for fiat. If you are from the U.S you should go with Coinbase , and If you are from Europe go with Bitstamp , they should allow you to transfer your funds to your bank account. (note that this require verifying your PERSONAL info)

1) learn about wallet security, cold storage and how you can store your bitcoins the safest way possible.

2) know that in the past many exchanges have been hacked and it may happen again. act accordingly.

3) very important since many forget this: find out about tax laws in your country, you may encounter serious troubles. specially if you are dealing with large amounts such as 30BTC (27K USD) every day.

4) exchanges my above comment suggested are good. also look at kraken.

The best way is to not convert it back to Euros. Why pay to do that when you can spend the money directly? There are tens of thousands of outlets that take BTC. It is the only money I use online.

much better to not use wallet on exchange sites online but to use cold storage so that it can't be hack because you have the private key yourself and dont save it inside your pc for strict security when the time you have malware on your pc and the hacker can access some files on your pc. As what rodeo said it is much better to use it online than to exchange it to fiat .

I would suggest you to buy a hardware wallet(ledger hw.1 is the cheapest) first and transfer your bitcoins into it. everyone with 5+ bitcoins should have a hardware wallet. :)
 i use bitstamp and kraken for buying and selling, you can use them too.

i guess you will already withdrawl that money from echange and thats a common thinking and the main problem is in the crypt currency to faint money convertion for that i will say find and extremly high respectful trader or the best will be you yourself can become a trader and exchange that money in little amounts at your own price ofcourse that should be related to the orignal bitcoin price too but in this case people will come to you for their btc buying and you can take their euros in exchange and also it will make a reputaion of yours in the market

Keeping your bitcoins safe is actually not the biggest problem here. The problem might be cashing out your 30 BTC and exchange it to fiat.
It is unwise to do it in one go, as large sum of money will most likely wake up your local tax office and then you will have to visit them and explain what is going on.
So if you can divide your sell orders as much as you can.

Some more good answers. Thanks.
In case I buy a hardware wallet, what happens if i Lose it or it gets broken?

You can backup the seed with 12 passwords or more, then buy another hardware wallet from the same vendor to recover you precious cryptocurrency.

If your hardware wallet is used as a cold wallet (meaning your private keys are stored offline within wallet and you deleted all the online files and copies).
Then as far as I am aware, if wallet gets destroyed or you lose it permanently, then your coins are lost with it.

30 Bitcoins is a big amount of money, you need to look about your country laws on earnings to see what you will need to pay if you convert all on an exchange to your bank account. If you don't convert all your bitcoins, take them off exchange and store them on a safe wallet (hardware wallet, paper wallet, software wallet).

If i was you i wouldnt be so quick to cash out, yes take some profit if you want but i would say that any profit you take now will pale in comparison to the profits you will see in the future,  ;D

Supposing you were able to get your hands in such a big sum of money, why will you want to convert them back to fiat, you can buy almost anything you want with bitcoin.

The best recommendation for safeguarding your coins would be to buy a hardware wallet since hackers are always looking for a way to steal coins

Do it like this. Choose a safe exchange, one of the bigger ones like Bitstamp. I know you're from EU (want to convert to Euro) so BTC-e is not a bad choice too.
Make sure you've set up your account properly and send a small sum to the exchange (0.1BTC). Convert it and send to your account to make sure everything goes smooth. Then send a bigger sum like 2 BTC and repeat the process. Check how much you can transfer without showing an ID, some exchanges require verification after a certain sum has been withdrawn.

As they said. Don't let your funds stored there for a long time. Exchange can be hack and possibly can steal all your funds. When you exchange your btc to euro or vice versa. Quickly transfer your funds into your wallet or transfer it on your bank account. Hacking incidents happen often. We dont know when they will attack.

I think you should not disclose the no of Bitcoin that you have first. Then I feel you should have your private keys as that will be the major step towards your security, if you do not have it then you are at a big risk. What you can do is find a person out here who exchanges. I don't trust the exchanges at all, they get hacked and then all the funds are stolen. Don't hold your fund for long on exchanges you will be at risk.

i think the best thing that you can do is to hold your bitcoin first and wait another increasing so you can sell your bitcoin and you can get the profits. if you are loss now, then you need to be patience before you decide to sell it and convert it back to euros.

Don't listen to people telling you what to do, I only suggest that best thing would be downloading electrum wallet, generating 30 addresses getting their private keys printing them on a paper and saving the addresses on a text document (note pad) sending your coins to a mixer and asking them to deposit 1 bitcoin to each address you are giving them.

After doing so you could keep doing that making sure no one will ever be able to link you to those coins, also don't worry too much about the safety of your bitcoins after doing what I suggested because in case of unauthorized access to any coin stash there are much bigger fishes than you :D

Don't forget to uninstall electrum and every file associated in hidden appdata folder assuming you have windows.

You need to save your backup passphrase in safe place so that you can recover your bitcoin if you loss your hardware wallet.

You can also use paperwallet which you can generate for free but it doesn't contain any recovery system if you loss that paper.

The safest way for you to do this would be to create 30 paper wallets or even more. As you profit, transfer small quantities to these paper wallets, until each of them contain 1 bitcoin. Now find some online wallet and sweep 1 paper wallet at a time into it, and then sell 1 bitcoin for fiat at an exchange until all 30 bitcoins are converted to fiat.

This will decrease the risk of losing all 30 bitcoins, if you are compromised in any way. ^smile^

If ever luck let me win the jackpot in gambling or earn a big profit from my investments, the first thing I will do is to withdraw it and send to my wallet. I am willing too to convert it to my fiat money and start cashing out maybe the half of it add to my savings and the rest will be left for future purposes like buying items/products in an online shopping store.

Agree with this one since we should not store our bitcoin on an exchange wallet because the risk of lossing it would be there and its really better to transfer it first to a more secure wallet such as hardware wallet same as you said and after that, cash it out on your preferred site which mentioned above.

30 bitcoin is still a huge volume,you can just store it in 10 different wallets in different sites. Web wallet is okay but if I were you you should better convert 20 bitcoin to fiat currency and just hold the remaining 10 btc. Bitcoin is volatile and so its also best to keep some of your investment in fiat currency. Then you could do some trading with your 10 bitcoins to make it 30 bitcoins again. Goodluck.

I would exchange on localbitcoins in small parts with different people

There are two way, one is to forget about fiat and go with bitcoin to buy what you need, you can re-invest them quite easily here

the other is to dump low amount if you really need the euro, these amount always below 1000 euro to avoid money laundering transmission from your bank

I don't think it is a good idea for you to sell that large amount of Bitcoin. The price is in a good state at he moment and selling now could mean that you lose out on making a lot of money. Also, it is not very safe to sell that amount of Bitcoin. You definitely should keep the coins in multiple wallets and completely avoid using an exchange.

This is an answer that caught my eye, since I have a similar dilemma: how to handle Bitcoin spending and tax.

If I buy something from an online store using Bitcoin, is it considered somehow tax free, is it considered some sort of exchanged between goods?
Can somebody enlighten me? Because this would be "too good to be true".

so you mean sir if the hardware wallet gets broken,  whatever coins in it can still be recovered?is this possible? i thought that when a wallets gets damage, it cannot be recovered anymore.

Another question, as I am very very nee to this. Might be silly but here it goes. Private keys are the seeds that are given to you at the beggining when you create the wallet?
Also what are the public keys? Thanks and sorrt for the noob question.

It is better to have a hardware wallet mate as long as you are not yet decided to exchange it to your currency, I guess that is more secured.

Such an increased security concern is not required, because these days wallets are found much improved with security features. Just diversify and place it in few wallets and have the personal keys secure. You can use it during the requirements directly or converting to fiat. Other than this if Op feels converting to fiat is risky make a investment with a trusted legit investment website even it gives low interest for the amount deposited.

I think local bitcoins will be best option for you because you don't want to reveal you ID
However, if you do you can go with coinbase.
I remember I found a website tor based and www based as well which send you PayPal money for bitcoins.
I will state the link here if I find it.

Several ways to go about it of which the most important is understanding the financial environment of your locality which to the best of my knowledge since its Euro it wont be palatable to move that amount of money. But I would say that you should try move it in bits and not be carried away by moving it once because doing so might attract unnecessary attention which is important for you to avoid at this point as the issue that might generate might be more than what you can handle.

Maybe he is cashing out to get back the capital he had used so it will be necessary. I would not do it instantly 30 bitcoin in one swoop of cash out. Try to do it little by little until you get back what you wanted and leave some for investment or just in case a big BOOM comes out of 2017.

So, generally, there to questions: 1) where to keep your Bitcoins; 2) How to convert your Bitcoins in fiat.
For keeping BTC Trezor wallet is good option in my opinion. Especially, if you have 30 BTC or more.
There are many ways to exchange BTC to fiat and it depends on how you want to do this: publicly or secretly.

1) Reply to first post of the thread:
Sell a portion when price is highest in say a weeks price range. i.e. sell half your bitcoins at the exchange....wait a few days for a dip and then buy again with all or part of that fiat you have from having sold half before. The point is you don't want to reduce the number of bitcoins because, as someone has said, it is most probable that they will be worth even more in the near or distant future. If you have sold half then bought the same amount of bitcoins when there's a dip, you will still have some fiat cash left which you may spend knowing you are still long on bitcoin as you should be.

2) Reply to post about whether Bitcoin is tax free: Not sure if you are referring to the tax when you buy a product. As far as I know if you buy from any store in Europe that accepts bitcoin they will charge you the normal price, including the sales tax that you would pay normally had you made the purchase with fiat in the first place. That is, they will charge you the price of the product in bitcoin at the equivalent exchange rate of euro to bitcoin they use. So in that sense, no, bitcoin is not going to be like buying duty free like you do at duty free places at airports. Now, if you are referring to some other type of tax, like taax on whatever gains you might have made between price you bought bitcoins and sale price of them...up to you to see that.

Also, regarding spending your bitcoin directly anonymously I think some of the debit bitcoin cards (VISA, MASTERCARD types) have the option of buying unnamed anonymous cards. There's plenty of information in these forums in threads such as
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1242788.0

Also look up halcash which is system to receive fiat from bitcoin at any ATM. Not anonymous for the receiver (person who takes out the fiat from the ATM) because you will have to input your mobile phone number but it can still be handy, also of course bitcoin machines all around Europe...

If ever I will receive huge profit, i will keep it on my wallet for a while then after a few days, i will transfer it into my bank account or convert it into fiat. i also have another option, i will invest it on my trusted sites. by doing that, i can earn more profit passively and wait again for another withdrawal :D

I was referring to the fact I don't want to see my bank account frozen or the IRS asking about me (although Bitcoin is not money).

If I buy from online store that accepts Bitcoin they get my name and address and can send it to IRS.
I know of ANON debit cards, but I'd have to use them at the local store (so I should get the physical version), else (online store) they get my name and address.
Also ANON debit cards have quite small limits and here we talk about amounts that can draw attention (if we ever get so lucky).

Halcash is a resource I didn't know of and I start reading about it. But from what I see it's tied to services where you have very low limits, if not registered (20 EUR/day, 1000 EUR/year).
However, it's the best option I've seen until now, although it means it's not anonymous (you have to register to do anything meaningful there).

Bro no need of the hardware wallet and all to safe guard your bitcoins. Simply you need not to share your private key and wallet.dat to anyone. Prefer desktop wallet to have your bitcoins. That would be fine.

I would only convert small amounts of bitcoins to EUR at a time to be safe. I will also split my bitcoins on different wallets just to be safe.

I agree with the electrum bit, but why do you need to print private keys on a paper?
Just make a note of the seed and you are just as secure.

if you bought them from an exchange at a much lower price, them get some proof you bought them, so you won't get problems to prove where your immense amount of money come from.  You might want to consult a lawyer before doing any big withdraw, to minimize the problems

if you don't have to prove that the value worth of Bitcoin you have come from a legal source(for example: you earned them in the forum with signature campaigns and offering services, then price skyrocketed to $10k+/btc), then better save them in cold storage somewhere safe, and spend them slowly, some few thousands USD/month at most shouldn't get too much attention

With the example you told us, you are saying that you got BTC30 profit? Kinda unusual since bitcoin quantity are not increasing while there is a bitcoin price increase. It should be BTC30 value in fiat so it's on USD value. You sold your bitcoin into fiat. Just correct me if Im wrong. To continue this, do you have any bitcoin exchanger there in your place that supports direct exchange of bitcoin to Euros? If not then find a way to have your USD in that exchange be converted in Euros.

On the other side of the note and situation, if you have BTC30 on hand, then get out from that exchange if you will not do trades anymore and stored it first in a safe wallet to considered, Electrum is my suggestion. After that only send bitcoin by batch and transfer it on your local exchange that conveting your bitcoins into Euros.

If you can use it directly why bother convert it into other currencies, but if you are good with trading and knows a thing or two about it you should invest some, and if you are not then just save your hard earn bitcoin for a value increased and stay away from gambling if you don't want risking you bitcoin to be gone!

30 btc is a big money in fiat and i don't think that will be good for you to convert to euro without make flag red to your bank account. i think you need to separate your bitcoin in many wallet like HarringtonStark said and then you can sell your bitcoin with small part and hold the rest of your bitcoin.

If you are that worried about information remaining in your computer you could create and installation just for that and then wiping the hard drive clean securely so no traces of the wallet remain in the hard drive, you could even use a high capacity usb for that if you have one.

Have an exchange account ready, verified and waiting. Like it or not, verified trading accounts are the most convenient way to securely trade bitcoin at current rates.

I think this would not completely protect his funds, since exchanges have several points of centralization. I think the important thing, as other users have recommended, is to have most of the funds stored in places for which only the owner of these funds owns the private keys.

To my point of view not all eggs in one basket. If I was you I would use the same policy like as if I had an investment stocks portfolio i.e a risk policy management which implemented via diversification. Therefore, most part 50%-60% I would keep it to hardware wallets (trezor, ledger, opendime sticks, anything after a research you believe is the safest choice). The next part about 20% I would deposit to 2-3 well known exchanges (to reduce the risk in case of hacking). The rest of my coins I would convert in fiat (using localbitcoins and cryptocurrency ATMs).

First is you must store it in a safest way that is suitable for you . All wallets has its risks it depends on how you can handle it . My recommendation is to use any cold wallet but if its impossible then a desktop wallet will do just be sure to keep it clean .

The safest way is to convert it to a highly reputable exchanges but that amount is huge so people might find it suspicious so just set a schedule for example is to withdraw every week for your transaction not get a lot of attention .