Bitcoin Forum

I want to sell my £217.92 Bitcoin balance to my GBP account and convert into cash, but only £211.45 is available (3% less). I emailed Blockchain to query why, but they have not responded.

Has anyone else experienced the same issue, and if so, did they find out why?

Could be many reasons.

1) TX fees you pay to move your coins so that could be coming off the top so to speak.
2) General fees. Most (all) exchanges charge a percentage point or 2 for conversions it's how they make their money
3) BTC price is very fluid so there is that
4) different exchanges have different prices: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/markets/ so what you see in 1 place might be different someplace else.

-Dave

Thanks for both of your replies. That all make sense.

You can try to use other exchange rather than blockchain.com to lower trading fees and conversion fees, but it will be still the same scenario, you will pay for fees.

But for the difference of €6, I'll stick to it since it not so much. Next time you should transfer your fund to much bigger exchange to reduce and save fees, at least when conversion to fiat.

This is one of those disadvantages of using the conversion feature in wallets like Blockchain.com. Exorbitant and hidden fees!
Much as it may seem easy and user-friendly. You end up paying the price in fees. If I were in your shoes. I would start exploring other Options. Like using noncustodial wallets and connecting my accounts directly to an exchange. I am pretty sure most popular exchanges support your payment methods or banks.

@logfiles which non-custodial wallets would you recommend? I’m presuming by exchange, you mean one like Bittrex?

That's not even a wallet, but an exchange. A real wallet is non custodial where they give you passphrase and you're only one that can control the wallet except you've giving the access to other person, he can access your wallet. An exchange doesn't give you passphrase, but you used your password which you had create an account before. Each address do have passphrase, in this scenario the exchange was know the passphrase, not you.

For beginner I recommended to use electrum or bluewallet, if you care with your privacy wasabi, hardware wallet, or Bitcoin core is your choice.

Hi there are certain fee that you have to pay. For example:
1. Fee that the certain platform might charge
2. Difference between buying and selling price
3. Fee for transferring to your bank account as well

You can do certain things to avoid some of the fee for example:
Selling them p2p
Finding other relevant exchanges
Find other wallets as well


You can find exchanges like kraken as well but it's a trading platform mind it exchange is different than a wallet so don't hold your coins for too long.