Bitcoin Forum

     Hi, thank you in advance for answering my questions regarding exchanges. To provide context, I'll be using bitstamp as an exchange. My question regarding buying coins via the exchange is do you actually own the coin? Like can I put them on an online wallet? If so how does one do that through bitstamp. My next question is regarding the way you get your money into bitstamp via wire transfer from the U.S, Has anyone does this? Can you please explain the process and if it has gone smoothly or not? And lastly, how does cashing out of bitstamp play out? Once you sell your bitcoins to someone on Bitstamp can you get your USD out of the exchange via wire?

 I may have worded some parts of my questions wrong, I'm a noob, please forgive me, never even wired $$ before, was just on the phone with the bank talking about it.

Anyone?

Once you have made a deposit of either bitcoins or government currency on an exchange, they are stored as an account balance on that service, you do not have direct ownership or control of them anymore. You have to initiate a withdraw back to your wallet or bank account to retrieve your money.

Before you send any money to an exchange, you should review their policy about identity, many will allow you to make a deposit, but will effectively lock your funds from withdraw until you provide notarized or apostille documents such as your ID, passport or bank statements.

I think most you can still convert to btc, send it to another wallet or exchange, and sell/spend from there. Maybe im wrong though...

So on bitstamp I couldn't sell the bitcoin into fiat and withdraw USD?

That's the whole point of an exchange. However anti-money laundering laws and such, you may have to verify your identity, and then money wire may take a while. You should look at the forum thread for that exchange and read up on other's experiences to see if it is an exchange you would want to use.

I got verified, when bitcoins were 100$ each and haven't seriously looked into them since now :(

As for properly owning the bitcoins and being able to use them, I'd need a bitcoin wallet or some type of client yes? What would you recommend?

Thanks again for the help btw mates.

You can leave your BTC on the exchange, but that's not a good idea. Many many people have had money transferred out of their account by the account getting hacked (stolen password or hacked site), or by Bitcoin-related services simply shutting down and stealing money.

If you want to continue trading for fun and profit, you'll need some money "live" on an exchange, but if you are simply purchasing BTC, you should transfer Bitcoins to a wallet that is solely under your control.

My personal recommendation is to use Bitcoin-Qt. It is the reference client and is secure in ways that other "lite" software and just about any web-based wallet are not. You should download it now and leave it open, it takes over a day of downloading the blockchain before it is ready to use, you might as well do that now and get familiar with the program too. Before you use it for serious money, encrypt your wallet with a password, and then create a backup of your wallet (file menu), and research how you keep that secure in case your computer hard drive dies.

Is more easy if you buy some ok pay dollars or something different than wire tranfers

You are wrong. Moving btc out of the exchange means that you must withdraw them no matter where they go afterwards. (An online wallet another exchange etc). And to withdraw you require id and home address verification. One exception that i 'm not sure and can't confirm myself is when you deal strictly in crypto with BTC-E.

correct