Bitcoin Forum

The way the market fluctuates. I am trying to understand how it is safe to do these wire transfers and such to initially get the funding for bitcoins. I hate how it seems like I cannot do some sort of instant funding and get the ball rolling.

if you use mt.gox or similar, you put your money into an account, and once it is funded, can trade. That being said, at times mt.gox is at over 2000 second delay.

Well with mtgox and bitfloor, you can get the money into your account, still in usd. Then you can watch the market fluctuations, and buy the bitcoins immediately when you are ready to.

You need to get the funds onto the trading platform before you can use them to trade for BTC.  With the amount of trust issues with trading fiat for Bitcoin, exchanges need to have the fiat in their account before they allow you to buy BTC with it. 

Similarily they won't allow ppl to add funds using paypal or credit cards, because they require trust that the user won't commit chargeback fraud after receiving their bitcoins.  Hopefully one day soon, there will be kiosks everywhere so you can pay cash, and instantly have your funds loaded to your trade account, but not yet.

It is quite difficult but most are secure.

When I make a cash deposit to BitFloor at any Bank of America branch, the funds are available to trade with at the BitFloor site faster than I can drive home.

EDIT: As of 2013-04-17 BitFloor has ceased all operations.

I user Dwolla > campbx. The funds take a few days to transfer, but then they sit in your campbx account until you want to buy coins. It makes it hard to take advantage of any short term price dips, but once the money is in you can sit on it for a while and hope for favorable buying conditions.