Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone

I'm new to the cryptocurrency world and recently started trading (at a loss of course.) I live in a country where there is only 1 cryptocurrency exchange company. However, the fees they charge are outrageous (5% for buying, 3% for selling.) However, I must admit the online tools are amazing (compared to other exchange companies.) I will give you an example. If I purchase 1 BTC NOW I pay $12,255 USD, and if I want to sell at the same moment I receive $11,111 USD (how can I make profit with this?)

I have found another company that accepts my local currency but read horrible comments on Trustpilot (not to mention the lengthy account verification which includes a live video of me saying certain characters.) I read many comments that even after providing the necessary personal information your account gets locked (but they charge 1.5% fees on buying/selling, which is acceptable for me.)

I thought about using exchange companies in the US but when I pay/withdraw money for bitcoin transactions I'm paying in $USD (I lose money both for buying and selling bitcoin since the bank transfers the money from local currency to $USD and vice versa.)

I'm extremely disappointed at this. Should I just sell all my BTCs and switch to my country's stock market? Or is there a better option for me that I'm missing?



 

Buy now, sell in 5 years :P

I would definitely avoid exchanges with a reputation for locking accounts and seizing your coins, especially after the accounts are already verified. Many smaller exchanges which have done this in the past have either done it to help cover the fact they are insolvent or have simply kept their customers' coins and exit scammed.

If it is day trading you are looking for, then a centralized exchange is probably your only option. You could use decentralized exchanges or trade peer-to-peer (depending on the volume in your country), but it isn't quick and you cannot day trade using these methods.

If you are comfortable sharing the name of the country you are in, then you might be able to get some more specific answers.

Heh heh, maybe.  I remember there used to be a service called wesellcrypto.com, and you could buy bitcoin and some other coins with PayPal and it was easy as hell to do it--but they charged fees that were at least as outrageous as what OP is describing.  But you know what?  Had I kept all the bitcoin I bought through them years ago, I'd have made a huge profit.

OP, you didn't mention what country you're in, but is it possible for you to use a crypto exchange that isn't located in your country?  I know in the US it's possible to trade on exchanges like Yobit and Kucoin, which aren't located in the states.  If that's an option for you, there are a lot of exchanges out there that have very low trading fees.

And as far as stocks go, that's something I'd always be for.  Nowadays most online brokerages let you trade with zero commission, which is something I never thought I'd see.  Oh, by the way:  if you use a platform like Robinhood to buy bitcoin on, you're not really buying bitcoin (meaning you don't really have access to your private keys and you can't withdraw bitcoin).  Robinhood is a great place to trade if you want to bet on bitcoin's price, but it's useless if you actually want to own it.

Thank you folks for the quick response.

Yes, my strategy is to buy and HODL (I can wait 5 years if prices will increase.)

Oh and I live in Kuwait (any good exchange company you can think of? Converting from KWD - $ USD and vice versa makes me want to keep my current exchange company :( )

Can you not use coinbase there? https://www.coinbase.com/places/kuwait

Not sure if pro.coinbase.com is available there but if you can do a bank transfer on to it then you'll pay 0.5% (I think) per trade...

I actually have an account there but it wont let me purchase anything before identity verification (I don't feel comfortable giving my personal info. to companies that are out of Kuwait.)

It wont even show me the price of purchasing/selling 1 BTC in KWD before identity verification...... Thus discouraging me from even thinking of uploading my ID card.

Can you pay in your country's currency with coinbase? And how secure is my personal information in that company? It seems much cheaper than the company I deal with.

I don't know if you can use the Kuwaiti dinar, I normally exchange using the pound sterling though so there's a chance they do - you could try contacting their support.

As for the safety, I don't really know how secure they are. When I did kyc verification I only needed a photo of my passport so assumed it wasn't as bad (they didn't need a "selfie" for example).

The fees you mentioned are extremely high. I wouldn't trade on such exchange with that kinda fees. High fees and spreads are one of the things I look out for before picking an exchange to make my trades, it wouldn't be cool if I make 5% profit and the exchange take it all.

Your best bet is to find another exchange, there are several centralized exchanges that offer their services to most countries or better still trade on a decentralized exchange. Then you can use P2p marketplace to buy bitcoin you would use for trading. 8% net fee (buying 5% and selling 3%) wouldn't help you in the long run. You might be making profits but it'll go into the exchange's pocket.

You obviously can't profit by day trading on that exchange. ;)

An 8% spread is pretty horrible, but I've seen people pay that much for credit card buys during the 2017 bubble. People routinely pay up to 4% on Coinbase. They do it because they expect long term gains immensely larger than the 4% or 8% fee they are paying.


Honestly, I've always thought the percentage commissions crypto exchanges charge are a scam when you consider the flat fees we pay with stock brokers, let alone the spreads. Crypto trading is expensive, so if you don't know how to maximize your gains and minimize your losses on trades, it's going to be a struggle.


What you first need to do is get your cash into BTC, then you can trade with very low (0.1%) fees on exchanges like Binance or Kucoin, who don't require KYC.
https://www.binance.com/en/fee/schedule
https://www.kucoin.com/vip/level

If you're unwilling to verify on a foreign site, you have a few options. The Kuwaiti site you mentioned is one option. Another option is P2P trading on sites like Paxful (make sure to stay below their KYC limits) or Localcryptos, if you can manage to find a trading partner.
https://paxful.com/buy/bitcoin/kuwait
https://localcryptos.com/Bitcoin/Kuwait

If you want to quickly get your KWD into BTC you are probably going to pay a hefty premium. The same goes for the other side when you want to cash out from BTC to KWD, but as far as actual trading goes, you can trade much more cheaply and without KYC on the sites mentioned above.

Binance and Kucoin don't offer KWD as a currency, and the other two websites for trading in Kuwait..... well, there is not much price difference between the company I deal with and the buy/sell prices on those two other websites.

Should I HODL? Or just accept loss and switch immediately to stocks (and have pain-free headache thinking about the cryptocurrency investment?)

It's really outrageous what the exchange companies in your country are doing right now, you can report that to the authorities, if proven, they can follow up or warn them, to reduce the percentage in exchanging each cryptocurrency.

It is burdensome for one party in exchange.

before you switch to stocks, you make sure my advice above, the next action of them and the exchange company.

If the same thing still happens, then the decision is taken to just transfer it to stocks.

If you want to be a long term investor then just buy it on your exchange with the high fees and just hold it for a few months...years. The fees won't mean much when it goes up another 50-100% or so.

If you want to day trade then you need to buy BTC once and then just send it to another exchange. There are tons of futures exchange out there with very low fees and there are also many exchanges like Binanace which have low fees also.

Most likely that exchange you are using is geared mostly towards investors and not traders.

I only found two exchanges that's close to your home:

1. Rain https://www.rain.bh/
Trading Fees:
- 1.5% for bank buy/sell on brokerage
- 4% for card buy on brokerage
- OTC desk - depends on size and currency

2. BitOasis https://bitoasis.net/en/home
Trading Fees:
- Maker: 0.05% - 0.25%
- Taker: 0.30% - 0.50%

Account verification is needed for both exchanges. You can't really escape submitting your personal information if you're dealing fiat with centralized exchanges.



- https://www.bitrawr.com/kuwait

Why not try to convert your local currency to USD or Euro? Send it to an exchange and do the trade.

Maybe yes, maybe not. Cut it if you are ready to accept your loss. You can hold it also and wait for much longer time to achieve your profit minus the hilarious 5% buying fee and 3%selling fee.
Well if you are ready to invest on stocks, why not.  Just think about it many times.

Whether you switch to stock market instead is up to you but just bear in mind that this in the long-run won't be as profitable as crypto. While I understand that the fees at your end are making you think twice about crypto trading, if you're going in for the long ride I'd say buy now for a long HODL - only if this is something you're comfortable with.

Perhaps, also VP might be an option for your crypto trading and dealing with the rip of fees you're getting charged using your local exchanges  ???

Since you already had bought BTC, you might as well try finding ways to make profit out of it. Don't insist on your local currency, it isn't sure if there will be trading volume to BTC/KWD if Binance adds it. But the trading happens on BTC/USDT that's where you can make money.  Trading fees in Binance is the cheapest compare to other exchanges known to mankind but this is if you are willing to submit KYC. 

Here's some options :
1. Using FTX : https://twitter.com/FTX_official (KYC is not mandatory, For Non KYC  member, withdrawal is limited around $2000/day. Less fee for selling and buying, idk if they will accept kuwait currency for deposit, but you can try it https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027668192-Individual-Account-KYC . No withdrawal fees.). And what i like most from FTX is : There's TrumpWIN/USD or TrumpLOSE/USD pair.
2. Install exodus wallet. You can buying and selling directly via wallet menu. https://www.exodus.io/
3. Install Atomic wallet. Have feature same as Exodus. https://atomicwallet.io/
4. Using DEX exchange.

I don't think it is a full fledged exchange you are using! It seems more like a currency exchange company where the other party to any trade is the company itself. You no need to mention that you are loosing opportunity and the company is the only one who is minting money out of your pocket. Try a full fledged exchange like Binance where you can make money on market opportunities.  


I wouldn't recommend that! In that case, you will always have a risk of loosing money for no reason. Where people is saying negative things about a company, it's always better not to use their services.


The exchange rate fluctuation may eat up your profit. Also you will have huge risk of being tagged as a money laundered if you transact a huge sum of money in short period of time.


May I know the name of your country so that I can suggest you a better alternative? Have you checked Binance or Localbitcoins?

Yes, so this is a multi-step process.

Step 1: Use your Kuwaiti exchange or a P2P exchange to buy BTC. Either way, you are going to pay a significant premium if you want to quickly buy BTC. That can't really be avoided, but you only need to do this once.

Step 2: Send the BTC to an exchange like Binance or Kucoin. Then you can trade BTC against USDT, USDC, or similar stablecoin.

Step 3: When you eventually want to withdraw your money back to KWD and your bank account, you'll need to sell the BTC on your Kuwaiti exchange or a P2P exchange, as in Step 1.

You won't be day trading against KWD. The whole point of Step 1 is to escape your limited options for trading against KWD. The vast majority of Bitcoin trading volume takes place in USD, EUR, and USD stablecoin markets. That's where you need to go to get profitable spreads (because of the high liquidity) and cheap trading fees.

Additionally, if you want to avoid KYC, then you are generally limited to stablecoin markets (or derivatives platforms like Bybit.....let's not even get into that). Altcoin exchanges like Binance.com and Kucoin still operate in a legal grey area where they offer trading without KYC since they don't have real fiat (USD or EUR) markets. BTCUSDC (Bitcoin-USDCoin) tracks BTCUSD almost exactly though, so it's perfectly fine for hedging fiat value.

Well, if the fee's were the only thing that made you move from stocks to crypto, that means fee's could be the reason why you move to stocks from crypto as well. However if you have seen a lot more about crypto than stocks and how it is here to change the world and not just make profit or anything, you could actually stay as well, we are talking about world changing technology here and we are trying to make it get a lot more adopted so that you do not have to use fiat ever again, in that situation fee to buy and sell is not really that important.

Obviously one day bitcoin transaction fee's will get low, it may take a bit more time but it will happen, and when that happens thanks to something like lightning network or any other technology where bitcoin transactions become less than 10 cents, the adoption will increase a ton as well.

That is enormous fee for trades I guess.

Why dont you select some local exchangers ? I mean that would probably reduce your charges way lot than this.

https://i.imgur.com/vviqP5r.png

This is the reason why I like the local exchangers a lot. 5% fees are 25 times more than the local fees inhere.

All you loose here is just 0.4% in total.

Thats ridiculous. You dont need to leave the crypto for this reason, all you have to do is just get new home to trade.  :P

I get that crypto could sometimes be not worthy of your time because it is not what people made you believe what it is, everyone talked about how bitcoin is the new money but you look at it and you see it taking about an hour to come to your wallet and you had to spend 10 bucks for it, and I get that it could be frustrating to have something like that, however that doesn't mean that it would be like that all the time.

You want faster transactions? Withdraw altcoins instead of bitcoin itself, you want cheaper? Use the coins that costs the least amount when withdrawing in the fee structure. You want to actually use it? Find what you want to use it for and check if there is any altcoins specific to that industry. There are tons of ways you could avoid high fee's without going to fully fiat route.

I believe that in some cases, the situation with high commissions may change if a trader uses their own coins of the cryptocurrency exchange itself, which gives very high advantages for the trader. In addition, some cryptocurrency exchanges make it possible to reduce the amount of commissions if the user passes full verification on the site.

Coinbase is one of the securest companies that r der in cryptospace.

U don't trust companies outside Kuwait with your info?? Which email id do u use? R u on fb or twitter?

I suggest to find a p2p platform that is available in your area, you can get a fair rate about close to market price. If you want to make some profit why not register to centralized exchange and do buy and sell without any huges fees. I don't know if some exchanges has retriction in your country but that is your task to find out. Check binance first if it is available in your country and also they have p2p too but on limited countries.

If your country having a crypto exchange means you also have traders on LBC like p2p trading platforms so you can try to buy bitcoins using p2p where 1% fee for advertisement and no fees if you are buying or selling to someone, which is better compared to 5% fee.

Those adjustments that you're seeing to the only exchange in your country is the allowance or space that they have for buying and selling rates. It's very common if that exchange is providing you to cash out and has other features to offer.

But this doesn't mean you must be discouraged with those fees. We also cater fees but we have an option to hold or look for a better exchange that offers lower fees which is favorable to what you think is a cheap fee. If you turn back to stocks, leave your bitcoin and hold it.

One of the most important things that many people never understand is that the fees you are charged are critical for your success, in your case the fees are outrageous, only the best traders will be able to get profits with that kind of handicap so forget about using them, but it is also a bad idea to use an exchange that sooner or later will lock your account and maybe even scam you from your coins, so if you have the money I do not see anything wrong with switching to the stock market and trying to make money that way.

There are indeed lots of options thought, it does really need up some bit research and those are indeed ridiculous fees but not really an enough reason for you to leave just because of that one
where you can eventually find much more better places that do get lesser which had been mentioned by some users about taker and maker fees. Well, he do still have the
full rights if he would decide to go back to stock but at least he should have some consideration on what people do say on here and he might able to listen up. It seems op is doing day trade?
You cant just expect for making profits on almost instant manner.  ;D

Thank you everyone for your support. However, I'm officially done with cryptocurrency (after investing in 2.25 BTC & 6 ETHER within 1 month.) After the immediate downfall of prices I immediately panicked and sold all my currencies (I sort of feel I made a mistake that now prices are going up.) I even tried to use bitcoin and payed my phone bills using BTC, and I also considered bitcoin to pay for my amazon purchases. However, the transaction fees were much higher than those of paying with a credit card (so why the heck would I hold on to my BTC?)

I will be moving to stocks now since it's safer there (not to mention they pay out dividends too.) I may return to Bitcoin in the future, but at the mean time I will focus on stocks until we can have a clearer picture of bitcoin's future.

My loses are estimated to be approximately $6k USD, including the purchase of ledger nano x, and the extremely high buy/sell commission fees.

Once again thank you everyone for your support.  :)

In my opinion, it is huge for exchanges costs of 5% for buying and 3% for selling. My advice is not to trade on that exchanges,
Unfortunately if you want to trade BTC / KWD, it is indeed difficult to find exchanges that support that pairing. Better to convert
your KWD to USD, and trading with the BTC / USD pairing. With this makes it easier to find exchanges with cheaper fees.

But if you end up feeling more comfortable and find it easier to make profits in the stocks market, that is your decision. Feel free
to move your Bitcoin to the stocks market.

Correct me if I am wrong, what the most people called about this scenario is the spread, the difference on the buying price and selling price.
It's really difficult to use that kind of exchanges, it's also like in our country, there are some exchanges that you can directly buy or sell Bitcoin directly to Philippine Peso (PHP).
What I am using before and now, when I buy Bitcoin using our national currency, I am transferring it to some exchanges and I will trade there.

Dude that's some insane amount of fees to buy/sell BTC. Since you are struggling so hard to buy/sell BTC you should consider doing KYC at one of the most reputable exchange and then use it for regular trading if that's your goal. If you are willing to hold your coins for a long term then you can buy BTC from a known person or may be some on this forum or you can also try a P2P platform like Localbitcoins.

Localbitcoins link (https://localbitcoins.com/instant-bitcoins/?action=buy&amount=&currency=KWD&country_code=KW&online_provider=ALL_ONLINE&find-offers=Search)

This is the same trap that a lot of users who are new to cryptocurrency fall in to, especially if you are used to the more gentle movements of stock markets. 10-20% swings in price is not an uncommon occurrence for bitcoin, and it is something you just learn to put up with once you've been involved for a while. I barely even pay attention to the price these days. As far as I am concerned, 1 bitcoin equals 1 bitcoin, and I'm fairly confident that over enough time the price of bitcoin in relation to the ever inflationary fiat is always going to go up.

Again, this sounds either like you've chosen poor sites to use, or perhaps there just aren't enough/any sites serving this market in your country. I pay for Amazon purchase via gift cards I've bought with bitcoin regularly, and between the price being slightly cheaper and some gift card merchants offering a rewards program, I often get it for around 3-5% cheaper than paying with fiat directly.

A shame that your first experience of bitcoin was a negative one. We'll still be here to help out in the future if/when you return!

First of all, do you think stock market is fee free? You are going to pay certain amount of trading fee there that is unheard of in crypto, I have seen as high as 2% there, it is seriously horrible because you are going to start with negative the moment you trade, it is not like crypto where you can do 0.05 or so, even lower in many places.

Moreover, you do not have to use bitcoin, that is one thing people are forgetting about, sure right now withdrawing bitcoin is not something you should do because it is very expensive but if you go ahead with some other small coin you could actually withdraw for almost free. This means if you think about high fee's on stocks and low fee's on altcoins, there is seriously a huge gap between them and you could stay here for longer.

Which cryptocurrency exchange are you preferring that has "outrageous" trading fees? I honestly think that centralized exchanges are the most preferred platforms for day trading since transaction fees are very low and speed is unquestionable. I may not recommend DEXs for day trading because the transaction process is kinda slow and the fees are a bit high.

The advantage of these DEXs is that they don't have the custody of the coins and tokens you hold. But centralized exchanges like Binance, Huobi, KuCoin, OKEx and others worked fine with me.

Yah, There are different exchange to choose from and their trading fees differs from each other. In my perception trading fees in some crypto exchanges are quite fair, and you can possibly earn that trading fee % in a short time vs a long time you wait for your stocks to accumulate profit.

There are many ways to make a profit out of it since you have a whole btc in your posession. I am assuming that you are a stock trader, You should already know that there are ways like holding your btc to gain some profit or some trading techniques you are comfortable doing.

The trading fee's would not be your problem since you know how to market works and how to gain some profit.

The trading fees is too much and it always happen every time the market pumps so if there’s a chance for you to use another exchange to trade bitcoin then much better. The decision is yours, you can sell your bitcoin and trade on stock market which you think is best for you. If you can’t afford the fees on trading with bitcoin then you can choose to hold until bitcoin goes to peak again.

Well, this question by the OP is will depend upon you. Stocks are not highly volatile in the market and I think the chances of getting profit perhaps also reduce not just like a cryptocurrency that you can invest now and perhaps a month ago the price will surge back into the market, but there is no assurance about this. Still unpredictable but if you are not willing to risk your money, and then cryptocurrency is the best for you. However, the fee that we are suffering now perhaps it is temporarily and it will back down later.

There's a reason people are putting up with the high fees and remaining in the crypto market rather than moving to the stock market, and do bear in mind that even with the stock market you'll incur fees.
The reason people prefer crypto over the stock market is because the former can lead to much higher returns in a shorter time than the latter can provide. As such, it depends on personal preference and risk taking if one should overt from crypto for the more traditional method.

That's your choice.

Fees really matter but if we think that investing bitcoin is profitable compared to the stock market, well, I supposed to choose Bitcoin instead. Buy now, then wait for the price to move high and then, sell it. That's it. But if you are thinking about easy money, you might be wrong for Bitcoin because in a certain thing that in never shows like than, we can never say exactly what will happen after we bought it.

It is really difficult to give accurate information of crypto market fluctuates all the time so you have to analyze the market well and then choose the right currency bitcoin is a very good investment currency the crypto market is at the top of all. There are many good exchange sites that have very low trading fees so you don't need to switch stocks it is easy to make a profit if you rely on yourself and have good skills about the market.

No free meal found anywhere. Bitcoin is also about being patient. If Op gets more patient on the fees and hodling, in time coming the fees will be okay as price gets stable. Volatile is high because direction is not clear yet.

It is a shame that you are leaving but after suffering such important losses it is completely understandable, I think that you just got in the market at a bad moment, the market has been rather unstable during the last months and it is obvious that for newbie traders these kind of conditions are very unfavourable since it requires a high level of expertise to navigate them without getting burned in the process, anyway good luck in your future endeavours and I hope you have better luck in the stock market.

This is why newbie traders need such knowledge about crypto and how it moves, OP does have the fundamentals because he is a stock trader but the knowledge he has about crypto is very limited since he doesn't last long. I hope this can be a lesson for those newbie seing this thread. Having that kind of loss is not easy but I also hope he recovers in stock market.

I think it is hard for him to go to the centralized exchanges since he is not comfortable filling KYC. Maybe in this situation, he needs to find out the local sellers who lived in Kuwait, best if that seller lived in the same city as him, to arrange a meeting with the sellers. That is what he can do to avoid the fees, besides he needs to pay a high fee. But if he can hold for the long term, I think he doesn't have to bother about the fees because after he bought bitcoin, he can store it on his wallet for some period time.

theres no trader that trading without a loss and how much more if your a newbie on trading . you will experience a losses at first but you can manage that as soon as you evolve  . cryptocurrency exchanges were online and you can use any of them doesnt matter where you live on this planet  .

thats not new . to the wallet i use they infact charge more than this but im not complaining because i know that they also want to earn but who the heck would buy and then sell at the same time ? makes no sense because you will obviously loss with that move your doing but except if you see the price pump a little where it leads you to earn a profit  .

He is complaining about a concept traders call the spread which is the difference between the buying and the selling price, you can see this everywhere, if you have ever tried to exchange your currency for a foreign one you will see that you are given different quotes depending on if you want to sell or to buy, and without a doubt that spread is simply too high and even good traders will find problems to try to earn money under those conditions and if you have no other place to trade then you should not trade as the circumstances are too unfavourable which is what the OP has decided to do already.

If you continue to worry about fees for the reason of buying and selling at the same time, I think it would be better if you leave the cryptocurrency market, because buying and selling at the same time will always incur different fees on each exchange. I'm just wondering, why would you trade without a time frame to finally make a sale to make a profit, because even though you are looking for an exchange with the lowest fees but you continue to buy and sell at the same time, then of course you are trading will always lose.

You can really decide to stop if you do see it unfavorable on your side which is really just a right call for someone to do so.There are lots of factors that do really affect out when it comes to fees yet we've been living on different countries which would means that we do have different currency value and when it comes to conversion then it would really vary from time to time.For taker and maker fees then there are lots of exchangers who do have less, he hadnt just able to explore into those platforms who do offer less, its just odd on having those 5% and 3% for buying and selling which i can really say that it is really too much.
Out of frustration then i cant blame him if he would decide to turn his back and go to stocks.

Now, I believe that you know already and finds your comfort zone. Cryptocurrency isn't your's destiny ( that was very unfortunate) but an opportunity to try. It somehow you had a bad experience that changes your mind and thinks about the stock market, well, we have the options also and even me, I choose the investment that will give me a favor that is why I choose Bitcoin rather than on the stock market.

Everyone is free to choose where to invest, and you feel disadvantaged by investing in Bitcoin. The reason is because the trading fees
exchanges you use are quite large, and you don't want to trade anywhere else. because your country's currency is not available. My advice
if you want to trade Bitcoin at low cost, try trading using USD pairing. But in the end you decide to go back to the stock market, if you feel
comfortable in the stock market it's your choice.

Thank you everyone for your support. This is a great community.

Actually I have given this some thought and want to re-invest in cryptocurrencies. I also introduced BTC to my supervisor at work  ;) I'm waiting for the price to fall a little bit before I buy some coins. Any recommendations for good coins?

Indeed I'm uncomfortable filling KYC in foreign countries, so no matter how much you guys walk/talk me into it I just wont do it :) Furthermore, I found out that there was not much of a price difference between buying BTC using my local exchange, and using my Ledger Nano wallet (the price difference is less than 1%.)

This time I want to HODL (for 10+ years) :-[

Do you recommend that I buy Billfold (steel seed recovery phrase) (https://shop.privacypros.io/pages/how-it-works)  for my long-term investment using ledger nano wallet, despite that I will have tiny (but long-term) amount of cryptocurrencies in my wallet?

No.

The Billfodl is one of many steel designs for backing up your seed phrase. It uses a "tiles in a template/holder" design. Like all devices which use this design, it is very susceptible to both fire and crush damage, and even fairly minor damage or warping to the outside case is enough to allow the tiles within to move around or fall out, resulting in catastrophic loss of your seed phrase.

Have a look at the stress tests performed by Jameson Lopp on these devices.
The full rankings are here: https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/
The Billfodl performance is here: https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/reviews/billfodl/

By far and away the best performing devices (and also the cheapest) are the ones which involve engraving or stamping your seed phrase directly on to either a titanium or stainless steel plate. You can either buy such a device, or you can easily buy such plates at a home hardware store and make your own.

Having said that, even more important that than is having more than one back up. Having your seed phrase engraved on a plate is all well and good, but what if there is an explosion or earthquake, and you can't find your metal plate in the rubble? What if there is a flood or tornado, and your metal plate gets carried 20 miles away? I have my seed phrase simply written down on paper. I am not too concerned about it being destroyed in a disaster, because I have a second copy in different physical location which I can use to replace my lost copy.

Try to do more research, there might be plenty other exchanges that you’re not yet aware of. Doesn’t all these big exchanges work in your country, like Binance and the rest of them? You should try checking them to see if they work. And you can also check out decentralized exchanges/peer-to-peer, you will be lucky to find rates that would work better for you.

I have been into a situation like this before, I was always busy and kind of lazy to do research and look for better exchanges than the one I was using then, and I was making huge losses due to the fees, till I was kind of fed up and decided to look deeper and found an exchange that has the best rates, it only works in my country though.

Whether you opt for crypto or stock market the risk associated with investment is not going to dilute. Investment is about risk and if you were to ask a successful investors how they got to where they are they'd most probably tell you 'diversify'.

So the point I'm trying to put across is that it is best to be involved in both worlds, let you sole dependency on either crypto or stock market wear away. Here (https://www.thebalance.com/should-you-invest-in-stocks-or-bitcoin-4121151), is an article addressing the exact same issue, should one look at investing in BTC and crypto market in general or switch their attention to stocks.

In the end, it doesn't matter what one decides if they consider it is the best for them. However, one must be properly equipped before making a decision, so a guide could be a consideration of the pros/cons of crypto over stocks and vice versa. Should you wish to read more about it, you can do so here (https://vocal.media/theChain/10-major-differences-between-crypto-and-stocks).

Crypto currency isn't a traditional asset, this is just an asset which have value from real supply and demand.Different exchanges got different fees structure but the transaction fee depends on the blockchain traffic it will be higher when the market is in bullish trend and as far as we compared the returns from Stocks is no where when we take the returns of cryptocurrencies.

Be very careful about recommending cryptocurrencies to other people, I am not saying to not do it but we must understand that the majority of people do not have what it takes to succeed in such a volatile market and if your supervisor decides to invest and losses who do you think he is going to blame?

A difference of 1% may not seem like much but it can be the difference between a profitable system and an unprofitable one however if you have decided to become a long term holder then that point becomes moot.

You are living in a country where there is only one crypto exchange or you haven’t taken your time to check whether there are other exchanges there are? And if you’re referring to local exchanges , why don’t you check out other big exchanges that are functioning globally?

There might be a better option for you. Or you can still try to ask around with locals that are also into trading cryptocurrency and know how things are working out for them, try to ask them about the exchanges they are using and the fees they have to pay, it’s always good to connect with people in your locality and know what they are into, it’s really going to help you.

There may be other exchanges but that does not mean that you should use them because they may have a bad reputation and you do not want to give your coins to an entity like that, in this case most likely the only exchange with a good reputation is leveraging its position in the market and charging huge fees knowing they are a monopoly, as such the OP had no choice but to give up cryptocurrency trading for now and decide to trade other markets for the time being.

Well high fees are only for btc and eth, for many other alts fees are still very low. We can't do much about high fees, after 2017 bitcoin transaction fees went up and somehow we get used to it, choose wallet where you can set up transaction fee, check withdrawal fees before you register anywhere, fees can vary from site to site. For ethereum its the first time we have so high fees, in past months almost everyday we have a record high fees. I am not so much into this defi hype, but as we can see many people don't care about high fees, they are trading and buying, and apparently many are earning good so they can afford to pay high fees.

Literally people get trapped into the defi hype that is why they are still trading even if the transaction fee is higher than profits they are going to make from a trade but still the fees are under control if they use centralized exchange because the recommended fee went down after a while now into 200 - 300 gwei.But for bitcoin the fees are under control already even 20 sats/bye transactions can get confirmed in 45 mins to few hours.

Many exchange site trading fees have increased a lot in the event of market ups and downs. I don't think you should switch to stocks for trading fees because you have to pay trading fees for trading and exchanging currencies in the crypto market. No matter how high the fee investors will not close their transactions but in case of trade you can observe different sites and see where the fee is low there is no need for high fee.

Those people that are not watching the size of their fees do not have any business becoming traders, the fees will be by far one of the most influential factors when it comes to being profitable or not, in fact when I was testing my system I found out that besides the strategy itself and my money management techniques the fees where the most important factor when it came to determine my profits, and it got the the point that if the fees were too high then my simulation will give me losses despite using the same strategy indicating very clearly that at such point it is better not to trade.

I did my research and there is only 1 cryptocurrency exchange (https://support.yallabit.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022994932-What-are-your-fees-) in Kuwait. As previously mentioned I have no intention of doing KYC abroad so I'm happy to stick with this company in exchange for my privacy.

For those who missed reading through-out the whole post, I changed my mind and already purchased BTC/ETH and happily storing them in my hardware wallet, hoping to gain profits in 2024 when ETH 2.0 is released.

Unless there is something useful to add I see no reason to bump this thread.

Once again thank you everyone for your feedback  :)

I recommend that you use Kucoin, Binance has always been a great option, but as long as you don't have problems because when it comes to seeking support from their team, they require KYC. The taxes you are talking about are very expensive, you must realize that the Bitcoin market is much better than the stock market, volatility is the ingredient that not everyone can handle and above all take advantage of.

Good. At least, you know what is good for you. If you already have your exchange, you can stick with that exchange, and don't use the other exchange if that exchange is not fit for you.

It's better to lock your thread right now since you got your answer.

The problem is that he mentioned that there is only a single legal exchange in his country and the fees are abnormally high. I agree that making accounts on exchanges where KYC is not required might work but the truth is that those exchanges might not be legal and you are at risk of losing all your money just to save the 5%. Because any exchange that is legal would usually require you to submit KYC as does Binance and other exchanges and I have not used Kucoin so not sure if they are legit and why don't they require KYC.

Trying to save the 5% or 3% fees might force him to use an illegal exchange which ultimately eats all the coins so forget bout the fees just trade as legal as possible and if the sell/buy fees are high just trade in longer windows like holding for longer periods and then sell to cover the 3% fees.

It cannot be denied that local cryptocurrency exchanges in various countries apply different fees...
but what I see right now is that large exchanges have applied cheap fees to overcome the difficulties of users around the world, but for withdrawal fees, you can't seem to complain about that because not all exchanges accept exchanges with your country's currency. If you object to the fees that are applied when making withdrawals in your country's currency then you should HODL your token for a long time until the policy on fee changes.

Unfortunately, in some countries fees are very high due to local exchanges policy. It's not fair but some exchanges make extra profit on traders. There is no use in complaints because they will probably not change their policy so try to access to some respectful legitimate exchange outside your country.

Presently, I prefer doing Forex trading and it is where I find FreshForex the best place to go. I find it simpler with the excellent structure that they have having low spreads, bonuses and various such stuff. I also enjoy 300% Bonus that they have currently for users.

That is good but it saddens me a lot to see a guy who wanted to be a trader has been forced to change his mind and turned into an investor because of some absurd trading fees from the only exchange present legally.

I wanted to suggest you that you might want to use VPN and register on exchanges where they do not require ID proofs or anything. In fact Binance does not require verification for around 2 BTC withdrawal limits daily and if you plant o trade small that is a good option I guess. But that said on a second thought, VPN might get you in trouble too so just avoid it and do what you are doing.

True but it helps others understand as well the problems that exists in crypto trading and the possible solutions, we as a community look to understand and learn every day so I don't think there's any problem adding valuable information by anyone :).

5% seems pretty high, Binance overs 0.1% and I found that Uphold is doing commission free trades now:
https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/81281/uphold-introduces-commission-free-cryptocurrency-trading

It looks like on the right platforms you can get similar rates to stocks which also have commission free platforms.

In my opinion, most likely we are not talking about high commissions of cryptocurrency exchanges, which seem to cut off most of the earnings, but about the lack of good experience for a trader in order to get a really decent income from their activities. At least in my situation, all my attempts to trade boiled down to the fact that I reviewed all my assets and directed them to investing in the top-rated cryptocurrencies. My decision is due to the fact that I cannot catch the wave that most traders in the cryptocurrency market are on. I always fail and that's all Apparently because I do not have the skills. And I believe that the current situation is the same for the opponent. But you shouldn't give up trading altogether, because you can always train and practice for future trading with the help of demo versions.

Hey OP, you’re still new to cryptocurrency trading, before you start talking about outrageous fees and whether you should switch to stock trading, do you know anything about stocks trading and do you fully understand how it works?

You shouldn’t just jump into anything, you might be regretting later. And moreover, why don’t you mention the name of the one cryptocurrency exchange there is in your country? So that we can be able to recommend other exchanges. There are so many other exchanges, and I can’t believe that it’s only one that is available in your country, maybe you just haven’t checked.

Stocks are not really good because of trading fee, they are good because they are usually calm and smaller gains compared to bitcoin, so people who are not great at trading in crypto just moves to stocks and that is how they make their money, but if they are not afraid of playing with crypto a bit, they would only focus on making money on crypto. Obviously I am not saying one is better and the other one is worse, they are both very good and I am fine with both of them, the trouble is not that one of them is better or worse, the trouble here is that they are different stuff.

So, if you find fee here a lot and you want to go to stocks, you are basically leaving one something different and moving to something totally different, just because they are investments doesn't mean they are the same thing.

If there is an alternative option to buying cryptocurrencies, you can buy any other altcoin and convert it to BTC on crypto exchanges. The trading fees are set by brokers which makes money with the outrages trading fees and there should be another way around to avoid paying high trading fees. You can use local P2P exchanges or top up your wallet for buying cryptocurrencies on coin swap websites. In stocks shares trading, the fees are not trader friendly too. In all trading platforms, the trading fees should be covered by maker/taker sides.