Not many services and exchanges to buy Bitcoins with cash quickly

[mmortal03]

As far as buying Bitcoins, if you want to get your cash in quickly (same day) to buy at a good price when it drops, there doesn't seem to be another exchange other than Mt. Gox that BitInstant supports, unfortunately. (Yankee or Gareth, are you listening?   I'm sure other exchanges would be interested in your services at this point.)

Some examples
Blockchain.info (not an exchange) also uses BitInstant to buy bitcoins for your wallet, but their price is currently the same as Mt. Gox's during the 12 hour closure, so I think they use a Mt. Gox account to purchase the coins for you.

CampBX takes Dwolla or KYC, but both take a number of days, less days if the funds are already in your Dwolla account, for instance, but it still takes time.

Bitstamp takes International bank transfer, so not really U.S. friendly for getting funds in to buy Bitcoins.

Coinbase (not an exchange) can only take deposits from your bank account directly into bitcoins, but that also takes time, and their own recent caveat is simply too much of a risk: you don't send dollars to the account and then convert, you can only send dollars for bitcoins at a pre-determined rate, or for now, even worse, an unknown future price:

How much bitcoin will I receive?

Due to higher than normal buy volumes, we are unable to provide exact price quotes right now.

Instead of pausing buys entirely, we decided to give people the option to purchase bitcoin at the market price in a few days. Once your USD funds arrive, we will exchange them to bitcoin at the market price at approximately Tuesday Apr 16, 2013 at 11:07AM PDT.

Note that you can cancel your order at any time up until your bitcoin arrive from the transfer history page.

The market price of bitcoin changes frequently. Below are some recent prices to give you an idea. These do not guarantee what the price will be in a few days.

Edit: Bitfloor uses LocalTill for cash deposits, e.g. Bank of America out of state deposit. It is usually confirmed in 30 minutes if received before 5pm. Supposedly, even Saturday morning deposits have gone through in 30 minutes.

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[justusranvier]

Bitfloor uses LocalTill for cash deposits, e.g. Bank of America, where available. I don't know how many days this takes.

Usually 30 minutes or less, sometimes 24 hours depending on how busy they are.

[moni3z]

Go on IRC and buy code to redeem into btc-e exchange instantly

[mmortal03]

Bitfloor uses LocalTill for cash deposits, e.g. Bank of America, where available. I don't know how many days this takes.

Usually 30 minutes or less, sometimes 24 hours depending on how busy they are.

I've given them a shot. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get over there until right at 5, so BoA said they can't do the transfer until tomorrow. Still good to try an alternative method to Mt. Gox.

[Herodes]

As far as buying Bitcoins, if you want to get your cash in quickly (same day) to buy at a good price when it drops, there doesn't seem to be another exchange other than Mt. Gox that BitInstant supports, unfortunately. (Yankee or Gareth, are you listening?  I'm sure other exchanges would be interested in your services at this point.)

It would be possible to start a competing service, but it would take a lot of funding. You would need to have funds lying on the exchanges as the traditional banking system doesn't move money that fast.

[mmortal03]

I heard in another thread that a forum user made a LocalTill deposit at a BankofAmerica branch open on a Saturday morning, and it was confirmed in 30 minutes on BitFloor.

[Herodes]

As far as buying Bitcoins, if you want to get your cash in quickly (same day) to buy at a good price when it drops.

I understand this is an interesting thing to do, many people would like to buy instantly when price drops. However, one must realize that companies offering such services also need to turn a profit. So if you bought at say 55, then the company would need to lock in their profit by charging a fee.

Now - if the customer makes promise of an order, and then sees the price doesn't move his way - he often abandons the trade, or doesn't honour the deposit.

For instance, if a website selling bitcoins say you can lock in the price at the time of placing the order, then a lot of the customers will not send the funds the following businessday if the exchange rate has moved considerably in their dis-favour.

As we've seen with MtGox, when there is a lot of activity, there's a lag. Meaning that from the time the merchant tries to lock in the profit (fee) till his order hits the orderbooks, it can take a long time, and the price may not be available anymore, so the merchant may actually take a loss.

It could be better to actually depost cash to an exchange, and have it lying there for such an opportunity. If you plan on speculating anyway, you could always afford to store a few dollars with a 3rd party.

[moni3z]

That's what regular stock traders do: they have cash waiting ready to trade. It still takes them 1-5 days to load their stock trading and FX accounts with wires and ACH. In my case I have a pile of litecoins. If BTC crashes I dump the coins in Vircurex or BTC-E and buy BTC with them.

[Nagle]

Getting cash out of the "exchanges" quickly is even harder. Mt. Gox puts all kinds of obstacles in the way of withdrawing USD.

• "All methods below are subject to a withdrawal limit of 1000 USD per 24hr period and 10000 USD per 30 Day period:"
  
• "Note: Wire transfers are currently taking up to 1 week to process due to the volume of withdrawal requests in queue.  If your withdrawal is larger than 10,000 USD, it will take at least 2 weeks to process." (That's been on Mt. Gox's FAQ since at least November 2012.)

That last strongly indicates that Mt. Gox doesn't have all the cash it should.  (Under Japanese money transfer law, they're required to have 100% of funds deposited with them in a bank account separate from their own funds.)

The transfer methods that involve non-bank third parties (Dwolla, AurumExchange) all have a history of losing or delaying funds, and Mt. Gox tends to blame the user or the other party.   

[ElectricMucus]

Nagle is back.  

[tvbcof]

Getting cash out of the "exchanges" quickly is even harder. Mt. Gox puts all kinds of obstacles in the way of withdrawing USD.

• "All methods below are subject to a withdrawal limit of 1000 USD per 24hr period and 10000 USD per 30 Day period:"
  
• "Note: Wire transfers are currently taking up to 1 week to process due to the volume of withdrawal requests in queue.  If your withdrawal is larger than 10,000 USD, it will take at least 2 weeks to process." (That's been on Mt. Gox's FAQ since at least November 2012.)

That last strongly indicates that Mt. Gox doesn't have all the cash it should.  (Under Japanese money transfer law, they're required to have 100% of funds deposited with them in a bank account separate from their own funds.)

The transfer methods that involve non-bank third parties (Dwolla, AurumExchange) all have a history of losing or delaying funds, and Mt. Gox tends to blame the user or the other party.   

Did you capitalize at 100x Nagle?  Because it sounds like you might be fighting some of the issues that one would expect in that case.  If so, good on you!  I lack the testosterone, confidence, and time to play more actively.

[mmortal03]

As far as buying Bitcoins, if you want to get your cash in quickly (same day) to buy at a good price when it drops.

I understand this is an interesting thing to do, many people would like to buy instantly when price drops. However, one must realize that companies offering such services also need to turn a profit. So if you bought at say 55, then the company would need to lock in their profit by charging a fee.

Now - if the customer makes promise of an order, and then sees the price doesn't move his way - he often abandons the trade, or doesn't honour the deposit.

For instance, if a website selling bitcoins say you can lock in the price at the time of placing the order, then a lot of the customers will not send the funds the following businessday if the exchange rate has moved considerably in their dis-favour.

As we've seen with MtGox, when there is a lot of activity, there's a lag. Meaning that from the time the merchant tries to lock in the profit (fee) till his order hits the orderbooks, it can take a long time, and the price may not be available anymore, so the merchant may actually take a loss.

It could be better to actually depost cash to an exchange, and have it lying there for such an opportunity. If you plan on speculating anyway, you could always afford to store a few dollars with a 3rd party.

This is all true for the direct service of the BitInstants of the world where they will buy you the bitcoins directly. To me, that isn't necessary. All I'm looking for is a fast way to get my cash in so that I can then use the cash myself to buy bitcoins on one of the exchanges. So far, two options of this sort seem to be available, one, use BitInstant to move cash into Mt. Gox, and two, use LocalTill to move cash into Bitfloor.

A third option may be to use banks that support Dwolla's FiSync (not very many at the moment).  I will at least be testing the speed at which I can go from Dwolla to an exchange next week to see how fast FiSync would be. Any other bank to Dwolla to exchange is still slow.

[Wingman4l7]

You can buy BTC "instantly" via Coinbase if they don't happen to have hit their 24-hour rolling limit.  Unfortunately the volume of purchases they've been dealing with lately means that this limit is hit pretty quickly.  Their "purchase $X USD worth of BTC at the market price when your ACH bank transfer clears" is a stop-gap option until they can handle a higher volume of orders. 

I put quotes around "instantly" because you'll get the current BTC market price, but you won't get your BTC until the ACH bank transfer clears, which can take a few days.  You can sell "instantly" as well (same situation, just reversed).

[mmortal03]

You can buy BTC "instantly" via Coinbase if they don't happen to have hit their 24-hour rolling limit.  Unfortunately the volume of purchases they've been dealing with lately means that this limit is hit pretty quickly.  Their "purchase $X USD worth of BTC at the market price when your ACH bank transfer clears" is a stop-gap option until they can handle a higher volume of orders.  

I put quotes around "instantly" because you'll get the current BTC market price, but you won't get your BTC until the ACH bank transfer clears, which can take a few days.  You can sell "instantly" as well (same situation, just reversed).

Like Herodes said, that seems like a dangerous business strategy for Coinbase if the price goes down in that situation, because then they will be providing bitcoins that are then worth more than they were paid for when the ACH goes through. The flip side is that it is also very dangerous for the customer, because if you send cash for bitcoins and the price goes down, you'll be getting bitcoins that are then worth less than what you paid in. There's no way I would take up Coinbase on their "stop-gap" option unless I knew for a fact that the price would be going up significantly in the short term.

And Coinbase better really watch out about providing guaranteed instant sales, as people could just go there in a crash situation to get their cash out.

[repentance]

It would be possible to start a competing service, but it would take a lot of funding. You would need to have funds lying on the exchanges as the traditional banking system doesn't move money that fast.

Yep, this is the problem.  "Instant" services are effectively lending you funds for a day or two so you can trade before the money hits their account.  This requires significant reserves on their part and it means they can run into liquidity problems when demand is high (as happened with BitInstant last week).

[Wingman4l7]

You can buy BTC "instantly" via Coinbase if they don't happen to have hit their 24-hour rolling limit.  Unfortunately the volume of purchases they've been dealing with lately means that this limit is hit pretty quickly.  Their "purchase $X USD worth of BTC at the market price when your ACH bank transfer clears" is a stop-gap option until they can handle a higher volume of orders.  [...]

Like Herodes said, that seems like a dangerous business strategy for Coinbase if the price goes down in that situation, because then they will be providing bitcoins that are then worth more than they were paid for when the ACH goes through. The flip side is that it is also very dangerous for the customer, because if you send cash for bitcoins and the price goes down, you'll be getting bitcoins that are then worth less than what you paid in. There's no way I would take up Coinbase on their "stop-gap" option unless I knew for a fact that the price would be going up significantly in the short term.

This seems to be something that people are not getting about Coinbase's "buy BTC at a future market price" option.  I blame their order form UI -- they use the same one for either kind of order.  This is probably because this was supposed to be a stop-gap solution so I bet they didn't want to bother to slap together a different buy form.  You're not getting X BTC at a future price -- you're getting the equivalent amount of BTC for whatever sum of USD you paid.  This makes sense because they're only going to get whatever USD amount was in the transfer -- they can't modify the order after the fact.  This unfortunately means that you basically have to take the amount of USD you're willing to spend for BTC and divide that by the current market price they list, and use that as the amount of BTC to put in the order form.  Like I said, confusing UI.

Example:
Their order form says "buy _ BTC" and charges you whatever the current market price is -- say $100.  You order 5 BTC.  They put through an ACH bank transfer order for ~$500.  This transfer clears when the price of BTC is $50.  You will get 10 BTC (amount of USD in order / current market price when order clears -- i.e., $500 / $50).

EDIT: Went to try and buy BTC from Coinbase, and their 24-hour rolling limit has been reached at the moment -- but I didn't see the "buy at a future price" option.  Looks like they're maybe disabled it due to the confusion and recent problems it has caused (they had a bug with it a day or two ago).

[mmortal03]

Example:
Their order form says "buy _ BTC" and charges you whatever the current market price is -- say $100.  You order 5 BTC.  They put through an ACH bank transfer order for ~$500.  This transfer clears when the price of BTC is $50.  You will get 10 BTC (amount of USD in order / current market price when order clears -- i.e., $500 / $50).

Yeah, in that case, they should just say "Send us X amount of dollars and we will send you the comparable amount of bitcoins at the market price at the time your transaction clears." It can only be a problem for them to have people enter an amount of bitcoins that actually means nothing.

[Wingman4l7]

Example:
Their order form says "buy _ BTC" and charges you whatever the current market price is -- say $100.  You order 5 BTC.  They put through an ACH bank transfer order for ~$500.  This transfer clears when the price of BTC is $50.  You will get 10 BTC (amount of USD in order / current market price when order clears -- i.e., $500 / $50).

Yeah, in that case, they should just say "Send us X amount of dollars and we will send you the comparable amount of bitcoins at the market price at the time your transaction clears." It can only be a problem for them to have people enter an amount of bitcoins that actually means nothing.

I agree completely.  IIRC, they did say something like that, but it wasn't nearly as clear as the way you put it.  >.<

I think they've turned it off for now, it's caused nothing but confusion and trouble.  Definitely an interesting approach though -- and one that is likely to be a lot more viable if the price of BTC ever settles down.  Something like that would be great if the price was stable.