Beginner question! Please help

[emkik]

Hello,

Please bear with me, I'm a complete beginner.

I purchased £200 of BTC on Coinbase with the intention to send BTC to other exchanges so I can purchase some altcoins. As a test, I sent 5GBP of BTC to Binance and was charged 12GBP in fees. I also sent 2GBP of BTC to Jaxx and was charged 13GBP. What am I doing wrong? I expect this list of beginner mistakes will be quite long...

Sincerely,
Cryptonovice

[paolo099]

your answer is transaction fee and at the moment it cost a lot and as you seen, it's quite a lot even for small amount of BTC.
The first advice you will get here is to try to move from exchanger to exchanger by converting your amount of BTC into alts (like ETH or LTC) in this way the transaction will cost way less and it will be faster.
Then after you transferred you can always convert back to BTC and start to trade but i would suggest you to learn and trade altcoins because at the moment there are couple of them which are blooming and you can get some good gain with them.
At the moment there are more than 100k transaction stuck in the blockchain and in order to get yours accepted and processed in a good amount of time, you have to increase the fee you pay, this is something who's not really good at the moment about BTC and you can check blockchain transactions here:
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

Welcome to the crypto world and remember, this forum is a gold mine for information, be avid and read everything in here, in this way you will learn a lot!

[emkik]

Thanks for the advice, very helpful. Does that mean I should not send anymore BTC from Coinbase?

[propagate]

Thanks for the advice, very helpful. Does that mean I should not send anymore BTC from Coinbase?

In my experience coinbase only use really high network fees for BTC transactions so it does not make financial sense to send small amounts of coins.   

you could exchange your BTC for ETH

ether makes more sense at the moment.

[xindoa]

hi

best thing to do is change it to an alt coin before sending it as the fee is massive.
you can still transfer btc but make sure its worth it (because of the high fee)

[GoldMen]

But you had not informed about the rates before making the transactions? It's the first thing we have to do, because we have to ensure that the way we're going to launch ourselves to the market is clear, because the idea is to generate non-lost profits

[Rubick99]

That fee transaction is so big. You be better send your asset with altcoin. This will give you small fee

[xiaopang11]

As a beginner you can think of you this kind of behavior, because the fees of the currency particularly expensive, we usually put the COINS into other coin, then turns out that fees will be much lower, hope my answer can help you

[h0lybyte]

This all is the matter of transaction fee and coinbase is charging a lot of fee, if you have been charged 13 GBO for only 2 GBP, that clearly seems you have been charged 550% which is insane in the whole network of cryotocurrency. What i will suggest you for future trades is localbitcoins.com where you can find someone and negitiate on small transaction fee

[BTCforJoe]

First of all, if you'll be moving your Bitcoin out, it's best to do it all at once. Create a new Bitcoin wallet (where you control the private key!) by checking this topic out: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1631151.0

Then, once you've created your wallet, move ALL of your bitcoin out of Coinbase. Coinbase is an easy way to buy bitcoins, but it's absolute garbage as a wallet service. Once you've got your bitcoin out, focus on where you want to exchange it for other coins.

Transaction fees are high, so if possible, send as much bitcoin as you can in a single transaction, rather than sending many micro transactions. Or just hodl your coins and keep your fingers crossed in waiting for the network congestion to die down a bit (doubtful).

Good luck, mate, and welcome to Bitcoin lol

[gandhe83]

But you had not informed about the rates before making the transactions? It's the first thing we have to do, because we have to ensure that the way we're going to launch ourselves to the market is clear, because the idea is to generate non-lost profits

You should stop coinbase transfer to other trading floors because the current transaction fee is so high that you transfer with such small coin will cause you to charge more than the amount you want to transfer. . This is common to new entrants. Take note when you make a transaction, it will show the fee that the floor will take from you, see and analyze whether the fee is appropriate or not, if you can send it, otherwise stop send.

[KoinGuru17]

Open up a GDAX account as well. GDAX belong to Coinbase and you can transfer your BTC from Coinbase to GDAX for free, then transfer from Gdax to other markets. You will pay much less fee. Use Coinbas only money transfer from actually bank account.

[gwaposakon]

There are many question for beginner here in this forum, just find, just read all post and comments about bitcoin begginer so that you may learn about bitcoin in easy way and step by step way.

[jollyreti]

Yea the answer is that bitcoin has very high transaction fee, so it is worth to make a transfer when you do at least usd 1k.

[arcfaith]

Yup small amounts it's always best to transfer using ETH, unless you have a big amount or if the coin you are interested in only trades in BTC, but chances is quite small. Be active here and you'll learn a lot of things you can't learn elsewhere.