problems buying first bitcoin.....

[mikefot]

Dear Cryptozoologists,

I am total noob here........

Please can you help me a little.

I watched some videos about bitcoin and I burned a DVD with the Bitkey version of Debian OS and rigged up an old PC to host it ready for long term coin storage.

I then opened a coinbase account and ran into a problem.

The software wants you to take a photo of your passport or driving licence and upload it so it can create some ID for you.

The problem is that it is sensitive to any glare you create on creating the images when the photograph is taken (by Samsung S5 mobile in my case).

I feel as though I need the NASA Hubble space telescope people and Google Earth folks to help here (after they have been on antidepressants for six months as a warm up).

Any suggestions on how to take an ID photo that lights the coinbase candle is most welcome here.

Comments on how to break through the vaporware barrier here are most appreciated.

Regards

Michael Fothergill

[mikefot]

PS

Would it help e.g. if I put a pair of sunglasses in front of the mobile camera and took the photo through the sunglass lens?

Or would the image then be too dark?

Cheers

MF

[plen]

I've never heard or had of this problem with ID hehe.

• Go to a well ambient lit room/outside.
• Lay the ID on something.
• Turn off the camera flash.
• Snap.

Probably much easier to get a good quality snap during the day.

[mikefot]

Many thanks for this tip.

I turned off the flash and took a pic of the front page of my passport in low artificial light holding at the best angle to reduce light reflection to a minimum in coinbase front page upload mode.

For the passport fizzog page I held it open in one hand at the window in very low early morning natural light at a choice angle that got rid of the glare making sure
my fingers did not cover anything readable on the passport.

I then did hit the completed button.

On the pc it switched to: we are uploading this -it may take a few minutes etc.

This time the id was accepted.

Stone the crows!

Should I now add a bank account or credit details etc as they are suggesting and buy a few bitcoins?

Or would you recommend I do that with e.g. GDAX?

I signed up via another coinbase user recommendation so supposedly both he and I get an extra 10% bitcoin when I make the purchase....

Is that a good plan here?

Yours gratefully and ignoramously,

MF



 

[mikefot]

Dear Folks,

I entered some credit card details and then tried to buy £50 worth of bitcoin = 0.0562.


How long does the confirm buy take to finalise in coinbase?

Feeling dumb,

Cheers

MF

[mikefot]

Dear All,

I finally managed to make a SEPA payment to Coinbase and bought 0.00345 of ordinary bitcoin.

I need to transfer the bitcoin from Coinbase to a long term storage wallet created using BITKEY.

I noticed a twitter feed somewhere saying that "if you have balance on your currently BTC wallet, you can get free Bitcoin Diamonds(BCD) which was accrued to you as a result of hardfork on block 495866".

I googled around and discovered that I think I need to have put the bitcoin in a hard wallet before I can do this and I also think that I need to have bought the bitcoin before Nov 24 to take advantage of this offer.

I only bought the BTC on Dec 23.

Does anyone on the site know much about Bitcoin Diamonds?

Cheers,

MF