Bitcoin Forum

Is making a bitcoin exchange a profitable business? Has anyone have any experience?
And I don't mean an online one, but a local one where people can go and buy/sell bitcoin.
What do you think?
I can understand that it will depend upon the location, but I think it can help in inviting more people to bitcoin too, right?

Exchanges makes profit from taking fees on transactions(deposit/withdrawal) and while exchanging from currency to another. I don't really understand how It's not going to be online though? If you mean something like LocalBitcoins and decentralized too then you won't be able to charge any fees in that case and still pay for the hosting of the website etc...

Well if your talking about one that you can actually walk into IRL then I don't really think it will be profitable, you'll need to pay for rent, electrical bills and what not, and how exactly will you make money, if you charge a certain amount of fees per transaction you'll surely get some interested locals but I doubt it'll profit for ya. You'll have to think about marketing, security and what not, which will all cost, how will you ensure your customers aren't scammed? Insurance, Legality, Profitability, and Competition are a few big things to think about.

If your 100% certain you've got the legality sorted, a working business model to profit, a marketing crew to get your name out there, secure operations of the exchange IRL, and how you plan to compete with other sites such as LocalBitcoins which offers local meetups and are more known then you can go ahead. I'll be sure to stop by your local exchange if I don't have to fly out of my city to get there (or you can pay for my ticket if your exchange ends up going viral  ;D )

if you have many customer, you sure can earn money from an exchange.

Bitcoin exchange is a good business if you can first guarantee traders fund will be protected with maximum security follow this by attracting traders to your exchange. if you can have a daily trade volume of 100BTC for a start is a good achievement

It's really profitable. But you must see the potential of your location about how the bitcoin is familiar in your area. In my country, local bitcoin exchange is really profitable. Just using the fees and my friend can get his life even better.

I honestly don't think a physical bitcoin exchange is profitable, you have way more expenses than digital exchanges which means you'll have to charge higher fees than your digital competitors. So unless you find a specific market I doubt there will be many customers. Good luck anyways!

I do not think that an offline exchange will be profitable.
Lets say it would be legal to run the exchange. Every offline exchange is in direct competition to the online exchanges.
You would have to give the people a reason why they should come to you instead of staying at home and using the online exchange.
Your fees would have to be much higher than in online exchanges because you have much higher costs (rooms, employes, etc).
High fees scare people away and do not attract them.
And the number of people you can reach even in a city is way smaller than in the internet.

You can make an offline one, but you'll be back to technologies how they traded stocks like in the 90s where you have an agent or someone handling accounts. Which is primitive and inefficient. Also, it will still be online as you have to send transactions and all. What would happens is that its just an atm where people buy and then leave, or sell and leave.

It will be profitable though it can't grow bigger than online exchange, as he said about the location may affect his business.
I will say, just go on and try it. Without that, we don't know how it will be in the future, but I'm pretty sure you will get profits and make good relationship with your customers. Implement decent fees is important thing, I suggest it around $1.5-$2 for each transaction below $100 and 2% fees per transaction above $100, just calculate your interest as you want.
And, if you're ready to go online, it will be great for your business.

Not sure where you're staying but will base my answer on my own location. I've worked with a local offline (on spot) exchange before and the actual volume of BTCitcoin trades never been to a level that gains you any significant amount in terms of taking few percentages from each trades (my guess is, it's due to all the other alternative options that can be done with a press of a button, in other words online trades are way more popular than the traditional exchanges since the whole steps are a lot easier). On the other hand, it isn't worth the hassle to go and take permits just to see yourself making few trades on a daily basis.

Yeah I agree with this. Offline is really limited to what you can offer to the public, and talk about expensive advertising to just have people know you exist. Another thing is the hassle of moving to and fro the exchange. Making it online will make things really easy for everybody and you will have more audience when it comes to advertising it. And I think 90% of the people using bitcoins would likely prefer it online.

Yeah like you said it would really depend on the location, but then is that really what people want?  i'm not so sure.  Not only that but there would probably be a massive outly just to get the business open and then you would also have some serious red tape to deal with from government.  I would say that unless you have a fortune sitting in the bank and love high risk venture, then i wouldn't bother.

if you want develop exchanger must same use major exchanger, example bitstamp, bitfinex and more and you must have high skill quality programing, security and more, and must have high capital money
if you want only direct buy/sell sending youre addres and payment use local bank, is not campatible if must competition youre local exchanger
if you only buy/sell you can use marketplaced example localbitcoins.com

Yes it is very profitable and I have tried to do some selling and buying in small amounts for my friends when MMM is still around and kicking. The secret is to make a wide gap between buy and sell so you can really gain something.  For example the price of bitcoin for sale is 1000$ as stated in the exchangers then you sell bitcoins at 1001$ then if they will sell their bitcoins you will buy them at 995$. That way you will gain profit and if they complain just tell them to look for another seller and buyer if they are not satisfied with your services. To small time clients that will be plausible but to big time clients I dont know if it will work.

You need a huge customer base for it to be profitable. And if you are starting from the ground zero, then you'll need a big capital to advertise your website, because many companies which started earlier are already dominating the markets. You'll be fighting them to steal their customers.

And you will need licenses if you enable USD/Crypto trades. When the actually FIAT involves in your trades, it brings so much trouble with it. You'll need lawyers. A lot.

How profitable is it? Can you give us how much you earn monthly? It doesnt have to be the exact monthly earnings, just a ballpark figure will do, how many clients you have and how did you get those clients. Another important figure to look at is the growth rate. How large is your market and how much growth do you expect to have to maintain your trading business' success?

Yup. Its profitable business. Excahnge usually gets profits for every transactions has been made. Some exchange takes .02% or more. I think China exchanges the cheapest fee for every transactions. Actually China exchanges are not charging fees. But they are forced to take fees because of PBOC. If you want to create an exchange site. I think fee is the key to make it successful. So make the fee cheap.

Depends on where you are living. People create online exchanges because even if in thier area there are few Bitcoin users they can reach others by internet. But if you are living in a place where a lot of people use Bitcoin on a dialy basis then phisical exchange makes big sense. People who don't trust online services, and actually they have a lot of reasons for that, will go to your place.

If you do start an exchange and it gets popular and makes a lot of business then you would need to file taxes on those transactions and probably get a license to have it run.
Depending on you regional location that is. ;)

Thats a good idea and Bitcoin exchanges is very profitable but running Bitcoin exchanges is need more work to do on it.

In general it's profitable as you only get fees on transactions. Your aim is to invite more people to sign up in your site and exchange their bitcoins and that is where the expense will come. People will not use your exchange site if your site is not well designed and safe, bear in mind that the competition is there and if you want to succeed, you also need to compete or even outperform your competitors.

Bitcoin exchange can be profitable business. But what will be the difference of your exchange against an online exchange site?If you cannot present a remarkable difference or advantage against online exchange, your business may die because of lack of customers. Personally, I prefer to do transactions online in the comfort of my home. But if you can present an advantage that can convince customers to get out and go to your store to exchange bitcoin, maybe your business have a chance to thrive and make profit.

It's a good idea, but firstly it requires a large investment, and secondly, where you have a guarantee that people will want to change bitcoins from you? I for example will never change to a new exchange, or where I or my friends have not changed. I better change more on a proven exchange the cheaper on is not checked.

yes it is profitable but only if the exchange have a lot of active traders but you have to know that making cryptocurrency exchange is very risky because it can be aiming for the hackers and i think you had been heard that there are some exchanges got hacked and losing a lot of bitcoin and to making new exchanges besides the advantages you should thinking also about disadvantages too

Even an electronic exchange is quite hard to develop and maintain, considering most banks don't want to do anything with crypto and freeze crypto-related business accounts often.
A physical exchange will have this problem in spades, not to mention a constant stream of smearing by mainstream businessmen and lawmakers.

if you just want to invite more people to bitcoin then don't expect any profit at all. it should be done out of love for bitcoin and its future.

if you want profit only then it depends on the location and the fact that are people even interested in buying bitcoin physically? and what kind of customer would that attract?! i mean any regular person would just buy on an exchange (online) unless your shop offers better price which i doubt because of the fees that has to be added for profitability.

It's just a personal feeling, but I think it will be hard to get enough people into a shop so that it's profitable.
The bitcoin community is spread all around the globe.
And sure, you will find some bitcoiners in every city. But will those be enough to cover your costs?
Somehow I doubt that.

this is the problem all the major exchange have all the customers, will be very hard for a new exchange to get trusted and do proft from customers that have high loyalty to other well established exchange, and fee on a new exchange need to be very low to attract new investors, it need an hard work for security and customers service, people hate when there are no proper customers service, for me it's not worth the risk for now, maybe if crypto become very very big in the world

This is the case right now. The industry of exchanges is not saturated but the problem is that there is only quite a few exchanges that control majority of the volume of trades. I think the main reason this is the case is that there have been quite a lot of problems trusting new sites and also that the features and usability of most new sites is lacking. So that is why it is hard to penetrate this market. However, if you do succeed then you will profit big time. Poloniex does roughly 50,000 BTC trades a day and he gets around 0.15% in fees per trade. Which means Poloniex earns around 7,500 bitcoins a day.

Bitcoin exchange which covert bitcoins to altcoins and vice versa is a very good idea as most people complain that they could not find any such proper exchanges.
These days mostly people trade with people who are trusted. Profile of such are easily available though Facebook and local bitcoins but we need exchange for proper buy sell of bitcoins to Fiat.

Not everytime. There are too many exchanges these days and most of them are unable to handle requests of trades and hence delay their transactions which causes users to change the exchange site. Many exchange websites have shut down or been hacked too (recently coinsbank, coinbase and snapcard faced the same) and hence these websites are more vulnerable to hacks. Exchange websites only earn from the transaction fee and hence it's better to have a website like localbitcoins and paxful where users can themselves open trades and use the website only for transactions.

That's one of the most Lucrative businesses out and it's actually part of my plans to open an exchange in the UAE this year. The verifications and bureaucratic systems the local Bitcoin exchanges use here are just irritating and this has motivated me to create a system that can be user friendly and easy for all to use. The commission on the exchange of Bitcoin prices are huge profits that you can take advantage of plus conversion from the USD to the local fiat also fetch the exchanges some more money.

There is no point in creating a physical exchange if you want to deal with persons close to you then use localbitcoins, besides if you really want to create a physical exchange business you are better of exchanging dollars, euros and your local currency and offering bitcoin just in case.

The last time i checked there were around 200 exchanges, and well just few of them has some good volume, but they made their reputation with time, soo besides huge competition you will find you need to have a good staff team to update or add new coins, delays are a problem at some exchanges, as well their poor support system. If you able to reply almost all issues that may have daily and add almost all coins you will be fine.

Before altcoin industry got boomed, if you have got idea for running an exchange that must be a very right time for a profitable business model. Still you can make a profitable exchange but you need to dedicate your full day on this forum so that you can catch new altcoins to get listed in your exchange.

When you are actively providing support, you can find your exchange becomes famous and profitable.

You will get profit if you can get a lot of customer are made transaction sell/buy bitcoin but i don't understand you dont want build online exchange??

You don't necessarily want to create no. 1 top exchange with the highest possible volume. Aim rather at niche market of local currencies.
Asia (beside China and Japan), Africa or South America is still unsaturated market exchange-wise.
If you are located there and has time and resources to build and maintain an exchange your business can be huge in the future.

So like a trade or p2p? Or something that all customers will deal their buy and sell right directly at your funds?

You must have a decent amount of capital at the early phase and willing to take the risk since at first you only have few customers. You also need some good staff since you can't take it as one. It will just become profitable if many users will use that services.

And quite agree that it can boost knowledge too to those other people who really didn't know bitcoin. Good example is our local exchanger, without their good and unique services, I doubt we will have a good numbers of bitcoin users here in our country.

Exchange is actually profitable but there is no way one can excuse the online factor in other to reach more client speaking from the situation of things around here, having a location might be totally out of couple as the awareness is low couple with the cost of getting a location, running an office among others where one can do same thing from the comfort of your room or office in addition to daily job... That for me is just the right way to go about it...

A friend of mine was in that business in Singapore but they relocated to Canada last year, from our conversations it was doing well but left it after the halving last year when he sold all his Bitcoins for fiat and relocated.

I also have a friend who worked on this. He is still in this business, because it is profitable. Only such a business need a large start-up capital

I use to sell some coins to my friends but I don't use to charge any fee for these exchanges. However I also know some other friends that do use to charge some commissions (around 10% of that transaction) and it is really profitable for them, even some friends have been able to make a living from this business because of the great amounts and number of transactions that they use to carry out.

Well they are lucky to fool other people with 10% transaction fees. In the exchange I use, they don't charge for a fee. They make money though from buying low and selling a bit higher. Like a money exchanger. They just do a 3% difference in the buy and sell of bitcoins which is nice, aside from that there is no other fee.

For providing the money to make your users can get money for instantly. But this business very worth on the eastern countries. many of my friends were opening that service and really profitable. They are take 0.5 percent for the every transaction.

for a local bitcoin exchange to be profitable it has to be offering bitcoin at prices with a big spread meaning buy very low and sell very high compared to online exchanges. and this means less people are going to be willing to buy/sell there but at the same time if they had no other choice they will do it.
in other words, as you said it depends on the location.

May I know of you have some experience in running or managing an exchange? Its so easy to say that its profitable however there are costs and expenses to think about. I think most of the exchanges are barely making some money.

if we talking about local exchange to buy and sell bitcoin, it profitable as this what i know from my friend doing in daily. my friend buy and sell bitcoin into many people, not just from people near him but also for another cities in my country. he said that the profit is enough to fill his needs in daily and he can also saving the money into his bank account. i think this is not just about buy and sell bitcoin but its about helping people and makes them easy when they want to buy and sell their bitcoin.

Before
I`m selling bitcoins to a guy who have offline exchange, he is working with bitcoins and litecoins for 5 % fee. I sold him a lot, and he is advertising on several forums and online marketplaces in my country, also he was recommended to me from some members here on forum. He have a lot of work, and I think he is making a good profit each day. He is working for years, and there is money in this, just you need to be patient and to make your reputation, for that you need time.

I think it will be quite profitable, there are so many people need local exchanger in their own local place, but it is depend on how many bitcoin user and how good is your reputation in that area, if you handle your exchanger correctly it will be a profitable business, but when you build your reputation you need to spend more time to advertise you exchanger

No I mean in the sense that it would be a local exchange place, for example in my city. Where people can go and buy bitcoin with money or sell bitcoin. And the profits can be made with the rate at which we exchange for buying and selling.
What do you think about that? Is that good idea for a business?

Making a local bitcoin exchange would need some serious studies about the viability of this kind of project. You can be a local exchanger but what would make people to use your service instead the giants that are already established ? Maybe a local payment solution related to your country but nowadays, you can buy and sell bitcoin with all the payments possible. I afraid the market is somehow "saturated" and or difficult to be in at least

The present bitcoin users will be atmost 100 millions. When we compare to total world population, user is one among 7500 people. By opening local exchange, it may not bring you profits as expected due to less targetted customers. Online business is always better for such things.

Unless he can offer something really good to customers creating a new exchange right now does not seem like the best idea since most of us already have an exchange we like using so unless the exchange he creates is that much better then not a lot of people will use it.

I agree. But if you market your business well, this can also lead to more people coming into the bitcoin world, though it will be an exchange point, but if one can sell it, I feel it can be very profitable. Right?

In my opinion there would be no need for a local BTC exchange. BTC was designed to be open to everyone who wants to use it and it has the ability to operate outside of the law and instead it creates its own layer of payments that can cross borders. Why limit it by going local? Use it they way it should be. Borderless.

Bitcoin exchange can be really a good profitable business. At first, exchange need to be popular so you can attract more traders to trade in your exchange. And, the security of anyone who will invest or trade in your exchange. This can be good as long you will attract more people to use the exchange so that this can be successful.

What are you talking about? Having local exchanges doesn't take anything away from the open nature of Bitcoin. It just gives ease of use to the people who use Bitcoin.

OP, what you're talking about is basically a Bitcoin ATM. I have no idea how much profit they gain, guess it depends on their location.
I'd like to see some usage statistics from people who own one though.

It cannot be called profitable, but is rather a good way of spreading the word out to people who don't know about it.
I don't know about exchanges, but I have seen places here in India where people have opened Consultancies about Bitcoins and they are making others aware about this.

I have not tried direct exchange business but affiliate program of popular exchanges is paying me little amount with some interval of time so it's not a bad idea to go with affiliate programs first and then to build an own exchange.  Coping up with regulations would be the toughest part in my opinion.

Looks like you don't know the benefits and advantages of having a local exchange. You even called it as having a limits which is really not like that.

Please remember that not all bitcoin exchanges supports every country, more especially when it comes to deposits and converting money into bitcoin via withdrawal. I will assume you are in a country where generally supported by those popular bitcoin exchanges so you can say that thing. But even your country is supported, it's surprising that those exchanges don't even required their to use KYC or something like that and you can withdraw your bitcoin as a money easily?

Local exchange as OP mentioned was focused on direct transaction (buy and sell) bitcoin, maybe he want to give it a shot and consider online exchange require a lot of resources to start. Yes, every country need some local exchanges to facilitate and advertise bitcoin to local citizens, but an exchange cannot develop well without online support.

If they could get away with it good for them, but that is just too much especially since they were not offering anything besides just exchanging you r money, you can do thin in the forum and the rates are nowhere near as bad.

Of course it does. Why make your exchange local when BTC crosses borders in the first place? Why not make the exchange available on the internet for anyone from any country? Setting up a local exchange is counterintuitive.

It does not have to be counterintuitive, some people may not like to exchange their coins in a faceless international exchange by buying locally you could get to know exactly where the exchange is located and that diminishes the risk of getting scammed bu the exchange since you knew where were they located.

We dream about the mass use bitcoin, but as soon as more people start to use it, and these people tend to be not very educated in cryptocurrency then necessarily appear massive invasion of scams that will rob these people.

Before you comment make sure you know the meaning of counterintuitive and what I was trying to say in my post.

There is no need for a local BTC exchange if you want person to person transfers. You can use localbitcoins.com for that. Post your buy or sell order and specify that you want to pay or get paid in person. Its that simple.

The same can be say about any site using currencies like the dollar, the euro, ect... You can see scam coming out daily to fraud internet users. I am sure the number of scams using bitcoin is still very less compared to others currencies

I am also sure. Just cryptocurrency the total number of users is much smaller than the fiat currency users.
I often use heat exchangers, but I never cheated. I hope it will be so in the future

I think before opening the exchange office the awareness of the people about bitcoin is very important. Otherwise, it is impossible to find someone to sell the bitcoin. But I believe in the future we are going to see bitcoin exchange offices on the streets.

Good idea from my area few people know about bitcoin. Maybe by open a local exchange offline many people will come to know about bitcoin and others crypto currencies. I will still use this opportunity to ask this question. If a local exchange offline is open as a business who will one secured that kind of environment and what are the risk involved?.

I don't think it will. It will not even affect the popularity of it nor will your friends and the people around that offline exchange gain knowledge of bitcoins. I really think advertising it or promoting bitcoins will really encourage people to use it. What will make people use it is if they have a genuine need to use it, like for gambling or investing online.

If it pertains to bitcoin, then i would rather go to online system exchange rather going out there, why because people who use computers and internets are familiar with bitcoin..  While going out is an hazzle thing because you need to introduce to them what bitcoin is then  again bring them to the system to inform them and orient hem about it...  my opinion..

This talks about bitcoin exchange particularly at online wallets transactions having good transactions with a fast services offered to the account holders. Actually having that advantages of this digital currency era is so amazing and bringing comfortable comfort zone to us, specially making bitcoin as a source of fiancial support from btc to fiat cash exchange. That's why we are now at the peak of our dreams that may bring prosperity for everyone of us who strongly believe in the power of bitcoin.

The idea is good, but firstly you have to make sure if the local laws allow this, do they require any documents to register the business, then check for TAX, VAT etc.

Exchanging bitcoin locally is a good thing especially if you are located in a place where there are lots of people and the city is frequented by people all around the country.

I would charge at least 2-3% on each trade (buying or selling bitcoins) or maybe more depending on the monthly expenses for this service.

I don't have any experience to have my own bitcoin exchange, But I do agreed that bitcoin exchange would be profitable if you had something gimmick where other exchange don't have. And it if can give an assurance to all your traders to take  care of their fund to your trading platform.

Bitcoin exchange is good for a profitable sideline. You invest to earn at an appropriate timeframe My experience has made my bitcoin exchange profitable in many ways.

Before any bitcoin local exchange shops will be opened in every streets a bitcoin in huge volumes will be bought by that company. And after which they will be distributing bitcoin tokens that is equivalent to the actual amount of bitcoins they have in storage. Those bitcoin tokens can be used in payment even without internet connection.

i think the number of bitcoin users are increasing continuously. although still the majority of people do no know about bitcoin but still the progres of bitcoin accept-er is too good.

But still do not forget about the dangers and risks. Still need to have experience of sharing and know when to do it better. I am also confident that it can be profitable

it is better to change from people who have a lot of bitcoins and they just need a fiat) without commission is obtained at all), but the amount should not be $ 100  ;D ;D

how bitcoin exchange will iwant to know how exchange a bitcoin

it depends on the country you are in. i suggest check the place first or do a quick survey, if you found out that more people are aware about bitcoins then you should go on with this business because it can be a good hit but if you think that less people are interested on bitcoins in your place then i think you should find another alternative business than this.

Bitcoin exchange is great business.  We know Bitcoin is the best currency of online Market. There are many ways to use it.. all the way, Bitcoin exchange one kind of. It is very profitable. If you can first guarantee trades found Will be  protected  with maxxiam be security Flow this bay attracting trades to ur exchange my so it is more important.

yes it will be a good business and a high income if your exchange is have many costumer, you can get some fee from each transaction, you need to know about the fee. dont to high and dont to low so you need to set the fee is in a good ones

You can convert your alts into BTC in an exchange an cash it right away its that simple

so we need to be careful too with the risks of bitcoin, because the bitcoin is not always beneficial for us, so we also need to see the progress and monitor it, so as not to be exposed to high risk.