The first time I googled Binance, the top hit (and the only direct link to binance.com) was an Ad. It felt fishy, somehow, and I was unsure about using it. However there were a couple of coins it was offering that I
really wanted to buy so I did some reading on it (that's how I found this thread, btw
), bit the bullet and set up my account. It's so easy to set up an account. Level 1 Verification allows you to withdraw up to 2BTC a day, and all you need is an email address. I'm glad I did that because now I like it quite a lot overall. Here are a few things about this exchange that have made me confident about using it:
1) There's a reminder to verify their webpage upon login (please check that you're visiting
https://www.binance.com). Of course the onus is always on us to make sure we are not clicking through to a phishing site, but it's always nice to have a reminder from the original site itself
2) They are really insistent on 2FA (2 Factor Authorisation). As any exchange worth their salt should be. If you don't have 2FA on your accounts, get it. If you don't know what 2FA is, here's an explanation:
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/two-factor-authentication3) They send an email to your associated email account for each successful login. This means that if you're monitoring your email, you can verify that you, and only you, are logging into your account.
4) They send an email to your associated email account each time you withdraw something. You have to confirm the withdrawal via email before it proceeds. This means that unless someone has control of both your account and your email, no one can withdraw funds without your knowledge.
5) They support many airdrops and forks. I can't speak to all coins but I have gotten GAS and ONT through NEO, and ETF with ETH. That's already better than other exchanges (I'm looking at you, Cryptopia...)
6) Support is pretty decent for an exchange of this volume. I had withdrawn some ETH from them right around the time that the Cryptokitties debacle hit. It was taking way longer to arrive in my wallet than usual. Before I learned that Cryptokitties was the reason for the ETN network slowdown, I sent them a support ticket. Within 48 hours, I had received a response - during a period when they must have received massive volumes of support tickets, due to something that was beyond their control. My ETH was credited into my wallet very soon after that. For me, that showed a lot of class.
TRADING: As a basic trader (I buy to hold medium-to-long term) I find their trading view complicated to begin with. They have two trading views and I use the basic though the expert has some nice features, like showing your entire portfolio right there on the page.
What I like: - It has relatively low fees. Switch to the BNB option for fees and you save an additional 50 Percent.
- They have a nifty little 'percentage' option on their buy and sell windows so you can choose to spend 25, 50, 75 or 100 percent of your available BTC (or whatever market you're using) on your purchase. There's also a pop-up that tells you how many max units of each coin/token you can buy or sell, based on the purchase or selling price you have defined.
What I don't like: - As a total noob, I wasn't a fan of the sell order/buy order ticker. I learned to read it pretty quick but there are other formats that are a lot more intuitive. (to balance things out since I was critical of them before: I'll give credit to Cryptopia for their easy-to-use trading view)
- This is the
biggie: The fee is deducted from the coin amount you place in your buy order. It's not integrated into the window showing the total BTC spent. So if you aren't using the BNB fee option, and you put in an order for 10 units of something, you actually end up with a balance of 9.9 units. This is a huge deal if you're dealing with something like NEO. If you end up with 9.9 NEOs and want to send them to another wallet, you'll end up 'losing' the 0.9 NEO (minus transaction fees) because the NEO asset is not divisible.
If you want to sell your NEO instead of transfer it, you will only be able to sell your NEO up to 2 decimal places (other coins have different configurations.) Plus there's another transaction fee to contend with. So after all is said and done, you'll likely end up with 0.00xxxxxx worth of NEO, i.e, what is known as 'dust'. It's essentially wasted money, because those are balances that are too small to use in a trade. So unless you're willing or able to buy more NEO in order to 'use' your balance of NEO, those are small sums of money that are unusable. There's talk of Binance adjusting their policy on this but I'll believe it when I see it.
Despite this issue, I'm still happy to use Binance as one of my major exchanges. Transactions move quickly and support and communication is pretty good, as they showed during their recent maintenance issues. That being said, *any* online exchange is susceptible to hacks, and you should never keep more than you're willing to trade in any account that you don't hold the private keys to.
