Bitcoin Forum

Many of us keep our coins in cold wallets and they do not get used at all.

I have been thinking about buying extra coins just so I can use them to buy things. I want to help the bitcoin ecosystem and encourage adoption. However it occurred to me that it will cost me more just to do that!

I am a Brit and we don't have any exchanges to buy coins at market rates. I will have to go to localbitcoins or bitbargain.co.uk and these sell at a premium*. Thus I need to actually buy coins at much higher than market prices and then use them to buy things with the coins being at market price. It's a loss for me.

If I was in the USA I would use circle.com and buy the coins with a card. I would need to pay card fees and then buy products with bitcoin at normal price! Again a loss.

If I used an exchange I would still have to pay trading and withdrawal fees. Again I actually need to spend extra just to use bitcoin. This is a real shame.

Merchants really need to make bitcoin purchases cheaper so that we have an incentive to buy those coins and use them. We are saving them card fees, so they can at least cut those fees from the cost. However they don't.

* the cheapest coins at bitbargain right now are £164 which equates to $254. Last price on bitfinex was $239! That is a huge difference. Us brits need an exchange that allows for sterling transfers.

I use them all the time. Just bought a cleaning mat a few mins ago. It was not until I started spending them that I really understood why they will change the world.

I want to do this! But it will actually cost me 6% extra for each purchase.

A least my transactions can be anonymous and I don't need to give people my card details, but most people don't care about this. If bitcoin purchases are going to actually cost them more then we really have a problem. I hope the bitcoin entrepreneurs are thinking of solutions.

No I think you are wrong, keep bitcoins in a cold wallet isn't using bitcoin. Spend them for purchase a lot of things every day, like you do with the FIAT money is "using" them. Sorry if I seem arrogant, but this is my personal opinion.

6% sucks. I look for places that offer a discount for using them. Places like Overstock and Amagimetals have a bitcoin rate that passes some of their savings on to you. They should not be charging you more as they save 3% when you use BTC instead of a credit card. It is also far more secure for the seller. If you paid with a credit card it will take days to clear and verify your identity. With bitcoin as soon as it confirms they are paid and done.

I know some merchants do give discounts. But I will lose the 6% in actually buying bitcoin. If the merchant gives a 3% discount then my loss is reduced to 3%. I guess this is a british problem. We need an exchange for us.

Oh I see. That is a harder problem. I loose a bit also trading from dollars. Hopefully we will have a rally soon and our concerns will be swamped by profits.

~Cheers M8

I always use my bitcoin as soon as I buy it, usually to buy altcoins.  My plan is to sell the altcoins for more BTC, and then when I have enough BTC I'll put it in a cold wallet.

Personally I have only used BTC for online gambling as online gambling is illegal in the states with "real" currency.

because they don't trust bank to avoid freeze account for bail-out.
if i buy a car or a scooter, sure ... that i ask to the seller if it accept bitcoin.

and i force ...  ;D to accept it (because of the trusted payment).
seller are always open to ... a form of payment (after reading somes explainations).

Unfortunately speculation still takes a large chunk of the bitcoin environment, it seems the only way you have now not to pay 6% premium (or speculator tax) is to earn bitcoins doing something. However, if it wasn't for speculators a single bitcoin would be worth just a few dollars.
We need more competition among exchanges, this will surely bring down the premiums we pay today to purchase bitcoins but also we need to change mentality about bitcoins, when the focus will shift to their usefulness rather than their value in dollars we will see more adoption

Actually it's the miners that determine the minimum price.  Bitcoin could never trade for just a few dollars with the difficulty at its current level.

The price shot up from speculation, and miners brought it back down, but miners also keep it above a certain level.  In the end the real value of a bitcoin is the amount of electricity it takes to mine a bitcoin.  If anybody could mine a bitcoin for $5, then nobody would pay $200.  But they can't, so they do.

When it costs $1000 in electricity to mine 1BTC, the price will be over $1000. 

I love to use Bitcoin as well, but right at the moment is a very bad time to spend Bitcoins because the price has gone down quite a bit. The only solution to this may be buying just as many Bitcoins as you need and spend those, instead of spending coins you bought at $500 or even higher!

no i stopped doing pot a while ago.  i don't think anyone should use drugs anymore.  cause we are in Heaven

No, you've got it backwards.  Miners do not determine the price, they react to it.  The price/value of BTC determines the mining effort.  The Bitcoin network difficulty would never be at its current level if Bitcoins weren't so valuable, it's that value people seek and thus build massive farms to try and collect it.  When the mining reward decreases, so will the mining effort, and thus so will network difficulty.

I can see why someone who purchased BTC at a higher value would be reluctant to spend them today, but in the end it is a currency and if you're not spending it then what are you doing buying it?  It should not be purchased as an investment, which I think a lot of people do.  Instead of "buying" BTC it should be looked at as "exchanging" one currency for BTC.  The volatile nature of BTC makes exchanging it profitable in some situations, sure, but I think that's a narrow minded way of looking at it.  No reason to buy BTC unless you plan to use it.

Tbh, I only use a fraction of my btc for spending. The rest goes to an offline wallet that I use for saving. Though that's the case, every now and then I use btc as a payment method whenever I want to buy goods online.

If that's the case, how can you explain what happened during November 2013? Is it also because of insanely high electrical bills?

Well, all of us still use it, but not in the way we should be. Most of us use it as a form of investment.

The price shot up from speculation

This is probably one of the major obstacles for masses to adopt it. IMO payroll service is the solution to it. When employees got their regular bitcoin salaries, they would get rid of this kind of annoying experience to pay in bitcoin for anything.

I am buying and using, just allways trying to buy more then I spend. Using mostly on internet and in one coffe shop cause there is only few places in Croatia where you can pay with Bitcoin.

It really depends , when bitcoin takes a dip , i buy it and store in cod storage , when i need it , i cash it and if i get low and need bitcoin i buy and use it !

I get BTC by doing small services and then I keep it and invest in altcoins and use it to pay others here on the forums and on online stores that accept it.

I have never used it IRL.... YET.

There is no any places where I live that accepts it.

But I would be ready if I had the money to start advertising BTC and make people use it :P

I guess if faced with your situation, i can only buy low and hope for BTC to rise before i buy something with it. Again, i need to hope for BTC to rise that extra 6% which you will eventually spend on LB to buy the Bitcoins in the first place. Once you get to that figure then you can safely buy stuff with bitcoin, not worrying about the extra you have paid. Not the ideal way to do it, but then if you don't want to lose then this is the only option that i can see, unfortunately! :(

Or you just need a lot of buy support that will keep the coin in a range of 2% fluctuation a day.

So 100$-102$ so people wont lose money.

I stoppped using my BTC since I joined Bitcointalk forums to be honest , now I only give loans but get my money back eventually .
I prefer holding and hoping that the price will rise eventually (couple of years or something)

~ Madness

You never use it when buying something online or something like that?

Nop , never .
Well I was but I stopped when I joined bitcointalk as I said above . Most of the time I use my credit card or Paypal for online Purchases , beside all Bitcoins are full profit . I never bought them or anything only getting them from Selling digital goods , offering services or sig compaigns around here .

~ Madness

I buy bitcoin frequently, never used it to pay for anything. I would like to buy something nice with bitcoin but I can't. I don't live in the US.

Hmm... I only use my fiat for things IRL.

I do almost everything else online with BTC since its my "funny money"

So BTC is just a hobby for me.. That I profit a little from :P

I don't think that BTC is made just to be used as in most cases, we can either store them in some places giving some interests just like our bank gives us, or else even trade 'em in order to increase 'em...

Personally I keep a certain amount, as a "just in case" option, and then I buy some when I want to spend it, because, as others pointed out, it's only by actually using it as a currency that it becomes a currency.

By the way OP mentioned that he's a brit without an easy to use exchange.

Check tese guys out.  Not a referral link unfortunately.

https://coinfloor.co.uk/

Bitcoins truly have the potential to change the way we do transactions and revolutionize our decades-old banking system but most people only look at their value in dollar. It's totally normal to want to profit from something but greed is actually hampering a wider adoption of bitcoins. People don't use them for fear they will lose an opportunity to profit from a possible price rise. Probably if BTC stays at current levels for a while we will get rid of some speculators and start focusing on the usefulness of BTC rather than their value

Well, I do buy my coins and at the same time do some work to earn it. I keep most of it in cold wallet and leave some in my phone to buy certain things that I want like for example domain name or even at the local eatery that accepts bitcoin. When it comes to buying the coins, I don't mind paying about 10 - 15% extra as long as I know the sellers keep their promise to deliver.

For now I keep my BTC in cold storage, as the fiat price is way too low to use BTC otherwise. But I expect to change that pretty soon.

If you want to get some Bitcoin, try working for it. If you have a valuable skill, you can work for people in exchange for Bitcoin. I do it, and it works great!

Also, a new exchange I was checking out called Gebbit is pretty cool. It is brand new, and hardly has any traders yet. Its worth taking a look at Gebbit.com . They have a sleek contemporary design that is perfect for people new to Bitcoin. The fees aren't that bad so you can buy Bitcoin and spend it pretty well.

Whit the word "use" I meant : use for buy things , like the lunch, a t-shirt, a coffee, etc.... I also have some old FIAT value , but it doesn't mean that I'm using them, I'm only  collect them.

Right now, there is no much places where I can use BTC.
So, when I earn some bitcoin, I cash out it through paypal directly to my bank account.
It will be great if I could use my bitcoin funds for buying different digital products or services in my country, but still this is not the case.

That is really not good for the long term success of bitcoin. If you do not spend any of your bitcoin then there will be no bitcoin commerce, and if there is no commerce then there would be no reason it would have value

Yes ! more likely , i buy it for using it , and just a small amount stay away which is used for trading

its using it , in a non - currency way which it was meant for. bitcoin is basically working like gold atm , which wasent the point.
The point was literally FIAT but without the middlemen

Me too, it's rare that I use bitcoins to buy things. The last time I used them was to buy a game online.
But where I live I can't spend them anywhere else. I've never seen a shop that accepts bitcoins here. : /

I have some cafes around where I could pay with BTC, but at the current prices I prefer to accumulate BTC rather than spend them.

Me too, but you can use them for buy stuff online (like technology products, books , etc...). Here in my city only a couple of merchant are accepting bitcoin as method of payment (through bitpay).

Indeed. Me personally I don't use them to buy. I like to store value on them, it's as legitimate of an use as doing groceries with it.

at the moment i am holding everything i have. if there is something interesting to buy with bitcoin then i will buy it.
saving and eventually spending is what i will do.

thats nice, saving bitcoins for future use :)

not sure about uk tax reporting but wouldn't it be best to buy new coins but spend the old expensive coins at a loss to report on paper loss?

From the 1st day, I have started using bitcoins, I haven't bought anything online using bitcoins.  Whenever I got some bitcoins,  I dropped them in localbitcoin.com and convert them to cash.

I never use it to buy something, just sell for profit, or invest to some projects

80% investment, 20% use in my case

I hold a small position in small storage, for the rest part I spend it buying stuff I want. The tech fascinates me immensely in terms of what it could do if widely adopted.

That's right !!! this is certainly an optimal strategy.

I'm also saving BTC for future use  ;)

I recently bought some bitcoins to use on newegg.. But soon after I made the purchase, the price rose.. I should have kept them.  >:(

Saving bitcoins is the best policy better than spending them in some stuffs. If the btc prices goes higher overnight, you will be in a good profit In future.

I'm using my BTC, gambling with it, buying computer games, sometimes trading on the market. I don't have anything in cold storage at the moment.

Yeah I use my BTC to buy electronics n stuff...but mainly to gamble with it..its really easy to gamble with BTC.! :)

Hoarding mentality will never be able to spread wide use of Bitcoin. We need to get out of the hoarding mentality and trade bitcoin for stuff. I offer mobile recharges to my friends for bitcoin and then i turn around and order alt coins for bitcoin. This way bitcoin does not stay locked in my wallet but is sent out. I would have loved to spend Bitcoin on purchases but i stay in a country where tech adoption itself is very slow, so bitcoin adoption is a faraway dream. Also somewhere there seems to be a negative perception of bitcoin, that is is used by criminals. This has to stop, the only way we can crush this negative perception is to show people the benefits and ease of using bitcoin through spending it! :)

I wouldn't call it hoarding mentality. Simply put, if the price of the Bitcoin is low in relation to fiat, you would spend 'too much' Bitcoins paying for some service. Once the price of bitcoin rebounds the number of people willing to pay for services will increase. No magic here.

LOL! that will go down again

You were away for quite long , has been happening since weeks
These up and down's

I don't buy BTC I just earn a little of BTC and convert it to money if I am of need of some cash. Other than than I buy stuff online for bitcoin like games and hardware.

I buy them basically so that I can gamble with it.. It has almost no hassle...n sometimes I buy hardware with my coins!

lol, i just buy to hold.
want to make a big profit.

yes, me too.
i buy and hold to become millionaire!

There is little chance either of you are going to get rich just by holding bitcoin. Its one thing to hope to double the money 10 times, and another to profit with a factor of ten.
Its a simple math, but yet somehoe people still believe that with a 100 $ they can make themselves rich. No large risk - no large gain
What im trying to say is that u need to constantly trade in order to magnify your goods.

cheers and good luck

That is some premium you guys get to pay, maybe you can find a trusted trader on here who can give you a better deal than that? OP have you looked into moneypolo and or okpay? The latter is a pain to get verified but you can deposit in sterling then transfer to USD which you can send to btc-e and pay at the cheaper rate, it is a pain but that would bring your price you pay down no doubt. I hold a nice amount not touched and i have the other i play with and when i get more than i started i send that over to my savings so i am always only playing with what i can afford to lose makes trading so much easier without the emotional attachment i used to have playing with it all.

Yes! if you're really looking to get rich with 100$ , you need to wait 3-4 years not only wait but use that 100$ btc to trade carefully making small everyday and then you might look into the possiblity