Bitcoin Forum

Is it a good idea to create a new wallet to use only for exchanges, or is a separate receiving address good enough?

Also, is one exchange better than the rest? Mt Gox is bigger. BTC-e looks to be a lot cheaper in fees than any of the others.

Is there a minimum trade amount? The sites lack some useful information.

BTC-E also charges withdrawal fees for crypto, unlike Bitstamp for instance, but year, cheaper trade fees. I trade on Bitstamp and BTC-E. Mt Gox has very tasty volatility though  :)

Different volatility? Interesting. So, they are each separate entities?

What is crypto? Is that some kind of trading or exchange feature?

They're all separate entities with their own rates of exchange between BTC and other currencies. When Mt. Gox first suspended USD withdrawals, their price diverged pretty quickly from the other exchanges.

Scarsbergholden is referring to the withdrawal of crypto currencies, which is what Bitcoin is. Mt. Gox and CampBX, for example, allow you to send/withdraw BTC for no fee, but charge fees for buying and selling. BTC-E charges a fee for Bitcoin withdrawal.

Understood. Overall, as of right now, is it a wash? I could be misunderstanding the fees, Gox seems a bit higher. No pun intended.  :D
Any thoughts on using a separate wallet?

How many exchanges are there?

Problem I currently face wit MtG is that it is very tedious to convert your BTC into another currency. Waiting for months to receive my EUR. When BTC just went up it seems MtG had quite a supply, that seems to have dried up in recent weeks/months.

campbx.com seems cool enough.  They're headquartered in Georgia in the USA.

They offer a number of ways to trade BTC, although I don't think all of the advanced options are available on their main site yet.  Like stoploss, I don't think that works yet.  And then they have some sort of thing called testnet, which I assume is like a beta version to be used for margin trading and such.  I haven't explored these options, so I don't really know for sure where they're at with their development.  Maybe someone can chime in here and explain more about what is and isn't available and how to use these advanced trading techniques.

Also, they have a lot of withdrawal to USD options.  Even without KYC, you can pull out up to $1000 a day.  They do USPS money orders, but I don't think they process them very quickly.  However, once they've done an ACH or wire transfer to a particular bank account, those process in the time you'd expect them to.

The site is a little bit slow, and they experience downtime every so often that can last up to around 5 mins.  It's pretty hilarious when it happens because they show you a cached version of the site on which you can't do anything.  Anyway, that sort of stuff is a little annoying, but it's not super frustrating or anything.  Still, on the consumer-facing technical side, I'd say they have a little bit of work to do.

All in all, I don't think it's a bad alternative, especially when one thinks about the dangers of having so much of the BTC market tied up in Mt. Gox.

Is there a list of all the exchanges out there, with ratings for each one?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Currency_exchanges

It's a wiki, so caveat emptor, but that's a pretty good rule of thumb in general, no?  Or as I've heard it said, unless you really know and trust someone 100%, then carefully trust, but verify.  ;)

Thanks Dude

My pleasure.

Also, if you trust an exchange, it can be used in many ways: to trade BTC, to withdraw into fiat, to store your coins in an online wallet, etc.

Yeah, it's pretty much a wash. Part of the decision should be based on the volume you plan to trade in: if you have hundreds of Bitcoins you want to actively trade, you're best off on Mt. Gox because they have the highest volume by a substantial margin. If you're planning to trade, say, 5-20 BTCs, you could trade on any of the exchanges without having to worry about your orders causing big price swings.


It's always a good idea to use a separate wallet for any BTC you're not planning to actively trade. A properly-secured local wallet is substantially more reliable than any exchange, since the exchange could go offline at any time with no warning. Unlike bank deposits, your funds on a Bitcoin exchange aren't insured in any way, so if the exchange disappears, there's a good chance your money's just gone.

Second that. People should also consider some kind of cold storage solution for large balances that are used as store of value. Of course, this option requires a spare computer lying around (some people use old netbooks or RaspberryPi's) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Cold_storage (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Cold_storage).

Paper wallets can also be a good solution.

For a more in depth analysis of wallet security check the wiki https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet)

Bitcoin Charts has a lot of detailed information for nearly all exchanges around the world http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/ (http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/).

It's worth spending some time on that site as you will learn a lot.

I've used both Mt.Gox and BitStamp and will try out btc-e next week.

For the last few weeks, the price of bitcoins on Mt.Gox have been higher than on BitStamp and btc-e.

Yes. For example, minimal BTC amount on BTC/USD pair on BTC-E: 0.01 BTC. See more here: https://btc-e.com/api/3/info (this is about BTC-E, look for "min_amount").

A lot :) I think near 50.

Are any of the exchanges easier to fund than Mt. Gox given the current situation in the US? (mainly Bitinstant being down)

Which exachanges can be recommended  while safe ?