Bitcoin Forum

Not sure if I understand correctly. Say I buy coin from Coinbase / Localbitcoins.  If I want to move what I just bought into another wallet, it will be charged?

I also heard when you buy, in general the buy price is about 3% higher than market price.  Same when you sell.  This mean if I trade at 6% higher, it will only be breakeven minus the fee (unless I keep them in the online exchange wallet)?

Another question is, if I want to keep coins in H/W wallet for safety, I have to consider fee and the time for transaction confirmation which is tired to the fee.  If there is a big drop and gain, everyone wants to do the same, the time will take longer even if you choose fast transaction.

If you move bitcoins from one address to another, a mining fee should be paid (or miners will probably never process it). The appropriate fee depends on the size of the transaction (in bytes) and not its value.

Services that hold bitcoins for you (such as Coinbase, LocalBitcoins, and exchanges) may or may not charge you a fee to send bitcoins for you. It is up to them to decide what fee to charge, but they pay the mining fee.


That is correct. Some people/companies buy and sell bitcoins as a service. That's how they make money.


Not quite. Generally, the higher the fee that you pay, the sooner the transaction is confirmed, though there are exceptions. You always have the ability to pay a fee that makes it very likely that your transaction will be in the next block.

If you have bitcoins that you may want to sell at any moment, then you should keep them on an exchange.

First question is answered above pretty much perfectly. Second question: fees and speeds are dynamic, if there are a lot of transactions because everyone wants to move bitcoin then it will require a higher fee for a faster confirmation.

It's right. When bitcoin's blockchain mempool becomes bigger, so transaction fee is increasing respectively.

Yes. Because any transaction that hits the blockchain is subject to fees to pay for the proof of work the miners are doing to confirm the transaction.

If you were to move money between wallets within Coinbase, Coinbase may be able to do that without causing a transaction...but this is only because they are an exchange and don't actually keep your Bitcoin in your wallet address.

I can answer part of your questions. If you use Coinbase to buy Bitcoins, they will charge a fee. I don’t know what the current fee is, but I think it would be more than the miners fees because Coinbase makes a profit from these transactions. If you move the coins off of Coinbase, I don’t remember if Coinbase charges a fee, but most likely they do.

If you want to trade Bitcoins like a day trader, don’t use Coinbase for this. You can move your Bitcoins to an exchange like Bittrex where they do day trading quickly and with a much lower fee than Coinbase. These trades will be very low fee like 0.15% (varies from exchange to exchange). The fees are almost insignificant because the transactions are being done on the exchange.