Bitcoin Forum

I took the plunge and baught my first bitcoin last week. It was a long process but overall not a bad experience at Coinbase to buy it.
During the wait I looked to arm myself with knowledge about how to safely hang on to my coin, so I immediately withdrew it from Coinbase and sent it on over to Blockchain.info wallet; big mistake.
I spent some of my coin and have about .03 left, which equates to about $30 as of writing this. 48 hours ago I used blockchain.info's wallet to send it back to my Coinbase to cash it out, and it just sat there at unconfirmed. After hours of researching it, I concluded the wallet didn't add a transaction fee, so I had to wait 2 days for the transaction to be rejected(?) and reappear in my blockchain wallet.
This morning my coin was back in my blockchain wallet (yay!!!), so I attempt to send it to my Coinbase wallet again and this time I made sure I included a generous fee (as advised by the support at blockchain.info). 12 hours later I get the first confirmation, and to my dismay it now shows a double-spend error. I have no clue what to do at this point, and I am unsure 3+ more days of frustration are worth the effort to retrieve my $30. I have no idea what is going on, all I know is my $30 is unattainabe, and there is very little information on how to retrieve it.
I feel frustrated, ripped off, and overall had a absolute terrible experience.

A bit more education before diving in might have helped you avoid some frustration.

Yes, a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC per kilobyte is generally recommended.

Since this is a single transaction received at an address, the transaction that sends it back out should certainly be less than a kilobyte.  Therefore, a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC should be sufficient.  If you're really in a hurry, then a transaction fee of 0.0002 BTC would put you ahead of most other transactions in priority of being processed.

The "double spend" shouldn't be a concern.  The new transaction should confirm just fine if it included a sufficient fee.  The "double spend" warning is just something that some of the block explorers do to let others know that those same bitcoins were previously included in a transaction that has not yet confirmed.

Are you willing to share the transaction ID or bitcoin address?  If so, we might be able to look at it and let you know if there is some reason it isn't confirming quickly.

Bitcoin is still in its infancy, and it is still published as "beta test" software.  As such there are some technical issues that will improve with time.  One of those issues is fee discovery (figuring out how much fee is necessary so you can pay enough without over paying).  The underlying technology is revolutionary, but the user interface still has a ways to go.

The bad experience is not Bitcoin's fault, it's the online wallets which are the issue. There is a reason why you can download your own wallets to use.

If you are writing this like a review, you're doing a bad job.

You never bothered to get your own wallet (Kind of important for things such as these) and it looks like you did no research what-so-ever. Blame the wallets, don't say that Bitcoin isn't user-friendly. In reality, it is very friendly, assuming you know the right stuff to use.

I am not sure what else to say, other than do your research before starting. Once everything becomes finalised for the mainstream, then if something like this happens, you can complain. Otherwise, no.

Its always your fault with the bitcoin community. When you get scammed.. your fault. When your wallet gets hacked.. your fault. When the largest exchange runs off with your money.. your fault. When your funds get stole out of an escrow.. your fault. Bitcoin is not user friendly at all.. not even close.

I agree with the topic and part of the OP.
I still do not understand how we are going to buy a cup of coffee  with BTC one day.. and even wait for 1 confirmation. Maybe we will be lucky and the coffee is still warm, and that is just 1 confirmation... imagine 6.

Why would you wait 1 confirmation?

When I pay with my credit card, they don't make me wait 6 months in the store before they serve me.

No Bitcoin is not a super user friendly thing. But wait, did anybody proclaimed this?

Exactly. I don't get why people keep bringing this 'how will I buy a cup of coffee because of confirmations' thing up like it's a problem. There's a few videos on YouTube of people buying coffee with Bitcoin and the whole process takes under a minute and probably roughly the same amount of time as it takes to wait for your creditcard transaction to confirm.

What'd you spend your BTC on?

they are not friendly user if you dont know how to handle it properly you need to learn a lot read and understand how to use it wisely and how to make it revolve around the bitcoin planet  :D sure that there are a lot of people who is after your bitcoin that is why you need to know how to protect it so no one can except you know how to have access to it

Learn and read before using bitcoin.

Pretty same as learning how to drive a car.

Who ever said it was user-friendly and who said you should come and participate?


Maybe review your knowledge-gathering process before blaming something else.


Of course it's your fault! This isn't nanny-state protecting every idiot from the stuff he fcks up. This is pure self-responsibility. All the problems you list are (greedy) idiot problems. It's not that I didn't "lose" some coins myself, but I don't cry about it, I learn from it and therefore I'm not an idiot anymore. That process doesn't seem to work with all idiots, though.

Bitcoin is a type of currency, like normal credit cards and fiat money, and they also went through, different stages of development.

How long did it take, for human kind, to evolve from paying eachother with huge stones, with holes in the middle, to the modern day, paper money and debit cards?

Crypto currency, is still in it's infant stage. {Compared to fiat, we skipped the stones, and paying with goats, and we now paying with cold coins} We will soon enter the paper money stage of fiat.  ;D

Be patient, one bad experience, in these early stages, is normal. {It's like being a early adopter, when buying a new version of the Windows OS... you going to have @##@$#%}

The currency is working, but it needs a bit of tweaking, to make it more user friendly for the mainstream to adopt it, as a currency.

You should use a desktop wallet on a secure computer, not online websites; This is because 'private keys' are used to send money, and the only way to have private keys is to use a desktop wallet. If you do not have the private key, you do not control the money; That said, you may want to contact the coinbase / blockchain guys about your problem.

This is sad but true. If the community is to grow things like keeping your bitcoin from being stolen need to be easier/less problematic.

There are some projects in the works that should make things easier but we will have to see how they work on release.

Everything you would like to buy from Amazon, CVS, Dell, etc. http://www.gyft.com/shop-for-gift-cards/

For people with no patient, there are other coin out there with faster confirmation.

I find the blockchain.info smart phone app to be very user friendly. press receive button, bitcoins come in, press send button, they go out, add a fee if you want faster processing, don't if you are willing to wait. That's pretty much all there is to it. You are saying its so complicated but thats only because you somehow managed to miss basically the only thing that you need to know. ::)

What can I buy with those coins, other than bitcoin? :D

I sell silver for nxt.

It is good to know there are economy for the other coins.

Unfortunately, if a transaction is sent with insufficient fees, it could be a good 2-3 days before it is spendable again. I agree with the general sentiment that bitcoin is not user-friendly -- I hope this will improve with time and development.

bitcoin is still young, and what we see today in the world of bitcoin is a fraction of that what it will become in comming times.
ofc its hard, and sometimes looks slow/dumb, but this is just the begining
ultimately, unless they hard fork btc, i believe btc will be replaced by a far better version of a crypto coin.

Knowing what that coin will be, and investing early, would be, like winning the lottery.  ;D

So just hoarding bitcoins, and not investing in Alt coins, might cost you later.

Hope Op, makes his $30 and 30x more soon.  ;D Do not write off crypto currency in total, because you got burn once. 

Sure, I agree that the infrastructure and applications around bitcoin will be far greater than they are today. But it can be frustrating nonetheless, especially when trying to turn other people onto bitcoin.

If you want to see, how much has gone into the development of just bitcoin, browse through Satoshi's posts. He/they/she/it  :) has put a lot of thinking into making it, what it is today. See below:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts;start=520

Indeed. But it is important to remember that there may be aspects of the protocol that could be implemented better. And as we run into problems (block limit, for instance), developers need to stay on their toes.

just have to live and learn, it gets fun if you stick with it. Many alt coins have WAY faster transactions times than BTC

Fast transaction time isn't really all that important, IMO. As long as a proper miner's fee is sent, transferring fairly significant amounts of money is fine w/ zero confirmations. With huge amounts of money, it seems that waiting for a few confirmations is not a big deal.

I think you might have found a different wallet, such as Multibit offers a more user friendly experience.  I have been using Multibit since last September.  Before that I made the mistake of using an online wallet, which got hacked.  I lost everything, which was only 0.01 BTC.  I started off slowly, with amounts worth less than a dollar, so it is less frustrating if something backfires.  It is good to start off slow with small amounts of bitcoin, while you learn the ropes, mastering the steps of how to send and receive payments accurately, backup your wallets and keep an organized list of all your passwords.  Become more confortable and confident as you start to understand what to expect with how the network behaves.

I'm sorry to hear that. Fortunately it wasn't the biggest loss. Was it an online wallet like Blockchain.info? Or a 3rd party web wallet, like the infamous Inputs.io?

Yes it was in fact the infamous Inputs.io.  It was the first wallet that I tried out, as was lulled into a sense of security by their website that boasted that they had most advanced encryption available for keeping your bitcoin safe.  A couple days later I received an email stating that they had been hacked and there was nothing that could be done to recover the lost bitcoins.  Thankfully I was starting off very small.  I could have just as easily gone all in and had many bitcoins stored there and then really gotten taken to the cleaners.

I lost some to Inputs.io as well. The only coins in there were from TradeFortress's own signature ad program, so it didn't feel as bad as losing freshly bought coins. I managed to get a bit more than half of them back actually, when TF was doing manual payouts on a case-by-case basis. For a very small amount, you'd probably have gotten it back, had you known. He since disappeared -- and reappeared as a bought/hacked account....

I actually agree with OP's statement a little bit, especially when it comes to exchanging bitcoins for fiat, more often than not it's a lengthy process and to some part you're going to have to trust a complete stranger to do it.

Well, an exchange not being user friendly doesn't really have to do with bitcoin itself, as much as a lack of bitcoin services that are well vetted.