Bitcoin Forum

I see that there are numerous exchanges like gdax and bitfinex, etc. but why should I use one over the other? I get it if one has lower fees but is there something else that would make one attractive?

Is it about the tools they offer? Is it the volume available?

Yes. I'd say that exchanges differentiate in a number of things.. There's tons of reviews available online to read about these things;

- Reliability, things such as having good servers, 2FA, cold storage for funds etc.

- Volume / Liquidity, how much is traded per day on their platform. -- https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/

- Lower fees/lower transaction cost, so things such as maker/trader fees, outgoing fees when making a transaction etc.

- What stream/"Ideology" do they support, think about the adoptation of segwit et al.

- The amount of coins they offer/what coins they offer.

- How quick they resolve support issues etc..

- Layout  + Tools, you might simply dislike how certain sites look, or miss certain tools such as Fib levels, or whatever.

Apart from the criteria mentioned by AdolfinWolf, I also look at that exchange's history:
- whether it was hacked or involved in controversy,
- how they reacted to unfortunate events (hacks, crashes etc.)

You could also check whether they are:
- friendly to hard-forks
- distributing GAS (if you are the NEO type) etc.

Ah ha. Thanks a lot.  :)

Low fees is an advantage for an exchange.

Some of the exchange are not newbie friendly, if your don't have enough knowledge of the platform you'll end up losing. That's what differ from some exchanges.

There is no exchange that has all the coins available in the market right now. There are coins that is available in one exchange but not available on the other exchange. Let's take IOTA for example, is available in Binance but not available in Bittrex. Some exchanges is user friendly, some has nice interface, and some has low fees.

i'd say the first thing that others forgot to mention which is actually the most important thing is trustability. you are practically leaving your money in their power so you need to trust them with it and these days it is extremely hard to trust any exchange.
for example we all though bittrex.com was a trusted exchange but a couple of months ago they scammed thousands of their users and robbed them out of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin and altcoins in total.

What happened after that? They still work as usual? I never heard about this before. I know that there are a lot of reviews online, but you can find some bad review for almost every exchange. It's hard for newbie to choose the good exchange.

Nothing really.

I also wouldn't call it robbing -- they simply had to adapt to new KYC laws ( Know-Your-Customer), which means that every customer/user on their site need to have a passport/ID added to their account, if you don't have it, your funds (like mine) are stuck, and only become accessibly after adding said ID.. There's been some outrage but there's still tons of people using them.

I don't think they have added claims that the funds are no longer yours after X days, -- right?

Security features as it play the most important role in any exchange to survive for the longer run. Then it is the liquidity of the exchange , trading fees  and the customer support where it plays an vital roles to answer the prompt reply o the query of the customer. This all makes the best exchanges which can do best in all such things.

In that case it's not a robbery, especially if they announced the change and gave the old users a few weeks to move their funds elsewhere. If they just suddenly changed the rules I would not use them.

Well yeah, that's the point, it was rather unexpected. I believe they simply on one day froze all the unverified accounts, without any prior notice, see https://steemit.com/bittrex/@penguinpablo/warning-it-seems-bittrex-is-disabling-accounts-for-no-apparent-reason

If you're looking at competing USA exchanges, like poloniex, you can argue that they are indeed handling the same situation wayy better, giving users a lot of time to withdraw funds / upgrade their accounts..
https://poloniex.com/press-releases/2017.12.27-Notice-to-legacy-account-holders/

Personally I look at these things when choosing a new exchange:

• Trading Volume - a lot of traders will agree with me in here. Trading volume is a vital part in choosing an exchange because it also helps you in liquidating your coins whenever you need to plus the fact that the price updates will be more lively which will, in turn be converted into profits if you executed and played your position perfectly.

• Customer Support - this is also important especially if you are quite unfamiliar with a crypto exchange and just learning the ropes of crypto intra-day trading. Personally, if an exchange's customer support reps would take a week to reply to any queries and problems I might have, that would automatically be marked off of my book. Customer relation is the key and communicating with your customers, especially answering their queries regarding your exchange, is also one important factor in gaining peers.

• Security Features and Trading Tools - this are equally important as the two stated above. Without these two, an exchange might contain the two aforementioned features but lacking the proper tools to aid you in trading is still not worth it IMO.

This ^^

Too many exchanges have been hacked or went rogue. Don’t keep all your coins in one exchange. I like to have control of my coins, I sleep better.

I agree that Poloniex had the right approach. The funny thing is that I've heard several bad things about the Poloniex, but it seems that I will avoid Bittrex in the future. Who knows, next time they can decide to increase fee to 50%. Thanks for sharing this information with us.