rkbabang

I don't know what is wrong with coindesk.com, I've never been to that website before, but it does appear broken. There are a million other places you can get a quote though. I usually use http://coincap.io/ If yahoo finance goes down and you can't get a stock quote from there, would you come to the conclusion that stocks are broken? Also you misunderstand my posts there is no relying on third parties. You can acquire Bitcoin outside of a company like Coinbase. You could mine it yourself, you could go to an atm, you could find someone to sell you some, etc. Just like gold, you can try prospecting yourself or you can find a private party to sell you some, or you can buy it from a dealer. You can also purchase a gold ETF which is something you will one day be able to easily do with Bitcoin as well. I've never physically owned gold as an investment, but I have in the past owned SGOL. With Bitcoin you can absolutely do everything yourself. You could write software to generate your own private keys and to interact with the blockchain or you could use opensource software that does this for you. You can run this software on an air-gapped computer, generate your keys, and completely control your private keys without relying on any 3rd party. EDIT: Also when it goes up 20X in a year it does give pause to rational players, but that also says nothing at all about what will happen long term with this. It hit around $1100 in 2013 then went back down to around $100. I am not saying similar crashes (or worse) will not happen along the way.

Yes you could use a computer that is never connected to the internet to create your wallet or install your wallet on a usb stick and only access it from non-connected computers. Then send your coins from coinbase to the address generated by the offline computer. You could also use a hardware wallet like Trezor this is pocket sized and not much bigger than a usb stick. I've never used one, because I just prefer to keep paper wallets, but some people claim these are a highly secure way to hold your Bitcoins. There is also the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet but those appear to be backordered until March.

Both. Your private key is made up of numbers and letters and your public address is also made up of different numbers and letters. But they can both be made into a QR code which can be scanned by a smartphone camera. Any string of numbers and letters can be made into a QR code, that includes website addresses, bitcoin addresses, or anything else. After buying on Coinbase go to your account and select "send", you will fill out a form which needs the amount to send and the address to send to. Fill in the amount to send, then go to jaxx and find your receive address, copy it, then paste it into the form on coinbase. Then hit the send button. It is pretty easy. Jaxx is an application that runs on your computer or phone, but it doesn't send any info off of your device. But yes if someone got control of your device they could steal your bitcoin from you. This is the same if you kept your private key on your hard drive, if someone hacked your computer they could steal your bitcoin. If you have a substantial amount and you are afraid of someone hacking your device you don't have to keep the Jaxx software on your device. The best way to learn this I think is to actually do it. My recommendation would be to take $100 to experiment with for educational purposes. 1) Set up a Coinbase account and buy $100 worth of Bitcoin. 2) Download the Jaxx app to your phone. 3) Run the Jaxx app and set up a new wallet. IMPORTANT: Write down the 12 word backup phrase that you are given and save it somewhere secure. 4) Once you have your Bitcoin available in Coinbase send it to your Jaxx wallet. a) In Coinbase select "Send". b) Put in the amount to send (the max amount). c) In Jaxx copy the receive address. d) in Coinbase paste your jaxx receive address in the address to send to. And hit the send button. e) Wait until your Bitcoin shows up in Jaxx. This could be as quick as 2 min or as long as an hour. But will probably be within 10 min. 5) Now that you have Bitcoin in your private Jaxx wallet. You can remove the Jaxx app from your phone. Just uninstall the app completely. It is now gone and no one can get your Bitcoin by hacking into your phone. The only way anyone could steal your Bitcoin from you now would be to somehow get a hold of your 12 word backup phrase which you wrote down when setting up Jaxx. 6) Now to restore your wallet you simply re-install Jaxx and instead of creating a new wallet select restore wallet the first time you run it. It will ask you for your backup phrase. Type it in and your wallet containing your Bitcoins will be available for you to use. You can do this to check the balance or to make a transaction. Then you can uninstall Jaxx again to have your wallet exist nowhere but on paper again. rkbabang, are you just simplifying your explanation here about what is bitcoin and how its transactions work? My understanding is that you never download a bitcoin. Bitcoins (more precisely, their values) are not stored on any specific device, but they "inhere" on transaction records on the blockchain network. By creating your own wallet and "sending bitcoins" to there, you are recording an additional transaction to your own address (this address is still part of the network). To make further transactions, you would need to know and use the private key that is generated by the wallet. And this private key is what gets stored in your wallet. And to answer emily's question of why you cannot simply download "bitcoins" - Because it is simply not a download of an information artifact, but software like jaxx interacts with the blockchain to participate in the transaction recording (ledger) and manages the key generation / storage. You could write software yourself that does this, but obviously not straightforward like storing a file. Yes I was trying to simplify it. More of a how to do it than a how it works explanation. You are correct there is more to it. Jaxx interacts with the block chain and doesn't really store anything. It is even more complicated than that though, as Jaxx is an HD wallet which uses a hash of your 12 word backup phrase to generate a new private-key/public-address pair for every single transaction you make with it. You can view all of your private key/public address pairs in the settings if you want to and use a block explorer to examine each one, but the software handles all of that under the hood for you. When you restore it on a new Jaxx installation using your 12 word phrase it regenerates the hashes and searches the blockchain to re-compute your history and ballance. The thing is that you don't have to understand how email works to send emails and you don't have to understand how bitcoin works to use bitcoin. If you want a deep understanding of the underlying technology you could start with Satashi's white paper, there are also good books and articles which you could read, but if you just want to start using Bitcoin to get a feel for how it works there is no substitute for hands on experience.

Both. Your private key is made up of numbers and letters and your public address is also made up of different numbers and letters. But they can both be made into a QR code which can be scanned by a smartphone camera. Any string of numbers and letters can be made into a QR code, that includes website addresses, bitcoin addresses, or anything else. After buying on Coinbase go to your account and select "send", you will fill out a form which needs the amount to send and the address to send to. Fill in the amount to send, then go to jaxx and find your receive address, copy it, then paste it into the form on coinbase. Then hit the send button. It is pretty easy. Jaxx is an application that runs on your computer or phone, but it doesn't send any info off of your device. But yes if someone got control of your device they could steal your bitcoin from you. This is the same if you kept your private key on your hard drive, if someone hacked your computer they could steal your bitcoin. If you have a substantial amount and you are afraid of someone hacking your device you don't have to keep the Jaxx software on your device. The best way to learn this I think is to actually do it. My recommendation would be to take $100 to experiment with for educational purposes. 1) Set up a Coinbase account and buy $100 worth of Bitcoin. 2) Download the Jaxx app to your phone. 3) Run the Jaxx app and set up a new wallet. IMPORTANT: Write down the 12 word backup phrase that you are given and save it somewhere secure. 4) Once you have your Bitcoin available in Coinbase send it to your Jaxx wallet. a) In Coinbase select "Send". b) Put in the amount to send (the max amount). c) In Jaxx copy the receive address. d) in Coinbase paste your jaxx receive address in the address to send to. And hit the send button. e) Wait until your Bitcoin shows up in Jaxx. This could be as quick as 2 min or as long as an hour. But will probably be within 10 min. 5) Now that you have Bitcoin in your private Jaxx wallet. You can remove the Jaxx app from your phone. Just uninstall the app completely. It is now gone and no one can get your Bitcoin by hacking into your phone. The only way anyone could steal your Bitcoin from you now would be to somehow get a hold of your 12 word backup phrase which you wrote down when setting up Jaxx. 6) Now to restore your wallet you simply re-install Jaxx and instead of creating a new wallet select restore wallet the first time you run it. It will ask you for your backup phrase. Type it in and your wallet containing your Bitcoins will be available for you to use. You can do this to check the balance or to make a transaction. Then you can uninstall Jaxx again to have your wallet exist nowhere but on paper again.

+1 Would like to enjoy the "slow death" with those willing to discuss and not insult. The other option is that we move the discussions to the investment idea board with separate topics such as “BTC - Bitcoin”, “ETC - Ethereum”, XMR - Monero”, etc That way we can keep the topic confined more narrowly to just one coin. I think everyone gets the general idea by now and has formed there own opinions.

The ultimate supply of BTC is fixed. Assuming BTC becomes a store of value and the human population continues to grow, then won't the value of BTC continue to increase in nominal terms? For example, would you expect a gallon of milk to cost less BTC in year 20 relative to year 1, because of the deflationary effect of a fixed supply of BTC versus a growing population of humans? If that is so, why would you ever spend BTC rather than your local fiat currency that has no fixed supply? The fixed supply of BTC (a feature, not a bug to many) is one of the reasons it's hard to see its use as a dominate currency, because I don't think people would accept the consequences of such "hard" money. The "it will be worth so much that no one will use it and that makes it worthless" argument again. Where did I say it would be "worthless"? What I said is that it won't be used as a currency in the sense that it will not be the medium of exchange for small day-to-day transactions. Just like gold today is not a day-to-day currency, but that doesn't make it worthless as a result. Also, I'm raising the point to suggest that people who are focusing on the ability to use BTC as an everyday currency may be focused on the wrong things. Oh, I agree with you then. I don't see many people who still believe that other than those who don't understand bitcoin at all. A lot of those who still want to focus on replacing cash in everyday transactions have moved onto to BCH (or LTC, DASH, XRP, etc) and have abandoned BTC.

The ultimate supply of BTC is fixed. Assuming BTC becomes a store of value and the human population continues to grow, then won't the value of BTC continue to increase in nominal terms? For example, would you expect a gallon of milk to cost less BTC in year 20 relative to year 1, because of the deflationary effect of a fixed supply of BTC versus a growing population of humans? If that is so, why would you ever spend BTC rather than your local fiat currency that has no fixed supply? The fixed supply of BTC (a feature, not a bug to many) is one of the reasons it's hard to see its use as a dominate currency, because I don't think people would accept the consequences of such "hard" money. The "it will be worth so much that no one will use it and that makes it worthless" argument again. Yes, it will not circulate as much as the dollar, nor does gold, because it is not a payment rail it is a store of value. It makes sense only to use it for long term storage or to move very large amounts. I don't foresee anyone ever buying milk or coffee with Bitcoin. EDIT: Unless you are talking about a tractor trailer tanker full of milk or a shipping container full of bulk unroasted coffee beans. Those transactions might be done in bitcoin.

I've heard this stated before, but have you really spent time trying to think how you would ban cryptocurrencies? It would require no changes to the internet. How about a law that says transacting in bitcoin is illegal and any merchant caught accepting, or attempting to accept (i.e. a pay with bitcoin option), bitcoin as compensation will be subject to imprisonment for up to 50 years? And any corporate merchant caught accepting, or attempting to accept (i.e. a pay with bitcoin option), bitcoin as compensation will be subject to penalties equal to the last five years GAAP net income? How easy would it be to enforce this law? There are something like 50 retailers that account for 95% of US retail. You just task one guy with going on their websites every day and trying to pay with bitcoin, if he can, they broke the law. You would just police the merchant, not the customer. You could also make it illegal to provide an exchange of bitcoin for USD. Isn't that an activity that can be easily tracked? Those are extremes, but it wouldn't be difficult to create incentives to avoid the use of bitcoin. Governments can put people in prison, and people generally don't like prison... Yes, governments are the enemies of mankind and often do nasty things. The US government once banned gold. It won't stop Bitcoin, just like the US government's gold ban didn't make gold worthless, but it will certainly slow down its growth and adoption in the US. Not every government is going to ban bitcoin.

I understand that the #of bitcoins is fixed, but this does not answer my question. Creating these cryptotokens is like creating money, as long as those tokens have a value and there is no economic benefit created (at least for the time being) with these tokens. This makes it inflationary in the real world. So the addition of these new currencies/stores of value on top of all of the currencies/stores of value already existing in the world is inflationary. I agree. I think any value these new currencies capture long term will come at the expense of something else, I would expect a decrease in value of fiat and precious metals. I think gold will be reduced in value somewhat, but gold will still have value because it has a feature Bitcoin doesn't (i.e. you still have it when the electricity goes out or the internet goes down), it is the best non-digital store of value. I would expect other metals like silver and copper to lose all value over the value they have as a commodity for industrial/commercial uses. I think the majority of value loss will come from fiat currencies as they will be used only for transactional purposes and lose all store-of-value uses almost completely and probably lose much of their transactional value to one or more altcoins as well. What is the mechanism by which 1 USD becomes worth less than 1 USD? It can become worth less in real terms through inflation, i.e., you can purchase fewer goods with 1 USD, but 1 USD is always 1 USD. It's not as if you can take 100 USD, and then it becomes 60 USD to "make room" for bitcoins valued at the equivalent of 40 USD. 1 2030 USD will buy less than 1 2018 USD used to and in 2030 the Bitcoin market cap will be equal to 4-12T 2018 USDs.

What happens when all of the bitcoin becomes worth $7 trillion like gold? Then why not own bitcoin2, which is completely identical to bitcoin, also is limited to 21MM coins, but is priced at $1 instead of $333,333? $1 has upside to $333,333, $333,333 only has downside. That's your substantially better characteristic. Once the $1 goes to $10 on that logic and makes the news, everyone says "here we go again! this is the next bitcoin!" and loads up on bitcoin2. The thing is that gold is what it is and can’t be improved, but if there was some substantial improvement that could be made to Bitcoin, that if it wasn’t done some other coin would take its place, I have no doubt that the improvement would be made. If it is worth $7T there would be far to much to lose to just let some upstart displace it because of some nifty feature or two.

Yes, exactly. And based on your posts in other threads, I take it that you believe that bitcoin has its own "intrinsic properties" that are also particularly suited for being a store of value, though those properties happen to be quite different than gold's properties. Bitcoin is rare (relatively speaking) especially compared with granite. Bitcoin is non-reactive to the normal human evironments, people don’t often accidentally drop their Bitcoin in cyanide solutions. Bitcoin is easily divided, combined, etc it is divisible to 8 decimal places, much more divisible than gold is (in a practical everyday usable sense). Also Bitcoin is uniform, unlike rocks or minerals such as granite or diamonds any unit of Bitcoin is indistinguishable from any other unit of Bitcoin so every unit of Bitcoin is worth exactly the same as any other. All of the features that make gold a good store of value are also properties of Bitcoin. But Bitcoin has features that make it better than gold. I can send any amount of Bitcoin relatively quickly and cheaply to anywhere on earth. I’ll send $100M in Bitcoin to China and you send $100M in gold to China I guarantee that the Bitcoin will be much easier and cheaper to send. Also Bitcoin is easier to hide, travel with, and protect. I can memorize 12 English words and travel with my entire net worth in my head. You could not as easily travel discreetly with your entire net worth in gold on your person. If the government outlaws gold again it might find your gold, but if my Bitcoin is hidden in my head they would have to kidnap and torture me to get it out of me.

Gold is rare (relatively speaking) especially compared with granite. Gold is non-reactive to the normal human evironments, people don’t often accidentally drop their gold in cyanide solutions. Gold is maluable and easily shaped, divided, combined, etc. You’d never easily cut a granite coin into pieces of eight to give change. Also gold is uniform, unlike rocks or minerals such as granite or diamonds any oz of gold is indistinguishable from any other oz of gold so every oz of gold is worth exactly the same as any other.

I think it will have no effect. Rather than re-type my reasons read my posts in this discussion: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/money-mustache-why-bitcoin-is-stupid/

There is some truth to some of the above, but I want to focus on this: "It sits on a computer in a database that can be shut or compromised by anyone at any time.Gold doesn't suffer the same fragility and I consoder it a useless investment as well." It isn't on "a computer", but on thousands of them or more. No one can shut off bitcoin as long as there is a network of some kind in operation. A large scale nuclear war which permanently shuts down the internet never for it to be rebuilt would permanently shut down bitcoin, this is the case where gold wins and why gold will always retain some value. It is the preppers store of value and always will be. But short of armageddon bitcoin is preferable to gold. As long as the internet is operating anywhere in the world the blockchain will live, but even if the internet goes down world wide temporarily the blockchain mining will continue right where it left off when it comes back up. It may take a few minutes or hours to reach consensus if that were to happen, but there will be enough people with enough invested to be motivated to make sure that it does happen. The blockchain could be compromised in theory utilizing massive amounts of computing resources, but the more value Bitcoin has the more expensive an attack would have to be. Even now it would almost have to be a state actor to pull it off, and once you get Bitcoin valued into the $trillions even states would most likely not be able to do it. There are many good arguments against bitcoin, but "it isn't physical so someone could turn it off or compromise it" isn't one of them. The best 2 arguments against investing in Bitcoin right now are 1) It has gotten way ahead of itself in value and there will be a giant crash before it someday goes higher when the technology is ready to go mainstream. 2) There is really only a need for one gold replacing store of value and some other cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin will be it. And 2.5) The governments of the world will find someway to destroy it while they still can. I'm thinking maybe passing massive regulations and laws against it, to drive the price down, then use a massive amount of computing resources to attack it. I'm thinking #1 is most likely and is not an argument for never investing in Bitcoin, just not investing now. I called the last one 2.5, because that would just cause #2 to happen. A state-actor resistant coin would need to be invented which somehow limits 51% attacks, I'm not sure how that would work. But I don't think the government (any government capable of doing this anyway) will try it. I think it is more likely that CB will eventually start buying it to diversify their reserves. This is quite interesting. I haven't looked at bitcoins or crypto-currency in any detail, but I was wondering, what's the reason behind choosing bitcoin vs another crypto-currency? Gold exhibits certain properties that other elements do not which makes it suitable as a store of value. With digital currencies, can't anyone come up with an alternative say, bitcoin-2, bitcoin-3.. bitcoin-n, that exhibit the same characteristics as bitcoin? So, why bitcoin and not an alternative crypto? I guess the corollary to that is, would gold be as valuable if we could somehow produce an alternative gold that exhibits the same characteristics as gold.. gold v2, goldv3... goldvn? I don’t know, but my gut feeling is that humanity only has a need for one store of value, so one would be picked that everyone would use. Maybe based on color or maybe based on having the first mover advantage. Alternatively maybe different regions would have settled on a different one, but this is less likely in a hyper connected world.

Thanks for posting this Add another +1. Thank you. I'm heavily invested in Ethereum and yet I am having a hard time seeing where he is wrong. Sold my ETH and NEO for BTC today after reading it. First post. It seems to me he is using the equation of exchange incorrectly - P*Q should be total transaction volume on chain, not the value of computation behind it. It would be like valuing a fiat currency by the value of the government/police/gold/infrastructure/etc backing it, not the aggregate value of transactions. Welcome to the board. Still his main points are still valid even if the target valuation is some higher number. There is nothing stopping applications from moving from one turing complete app chain to another. If the value is located in the applications themselves, then what does it matter what chain any app is on as long as there is sufficient computing resources to run it. So there will be little stopping movement from one chain to another, or even from an app running on multiple chains at once and to switch between them (eventually even on the fly). And as long as there is more than one app-chain competing the prices will fall to some minimum level to provide the computing resources it needs to keep the chain operational (with maybe some small level of profit margin). And there will most likely be 10s or even hundreds of app-chains to choose from. There may be good investments in specific apps as they grow (just like stock in companies can be good investments), but the app chains themselves won't be the place the excess value will reside. I don't know, I'm still thinking through this myself.

There is some truth to some of the above, but I want to focus on this: "It sits on a computer in a database that can be shut or compromised by anyone at any time.Gold doesn't suffer the same fragility and I consoder it a useless investment as well." It isn't on "a computer", but on thousands of them or more. No one can shut off bitcoin as long as there is a network of some kind in operation. A large scale nuclear war which permanently shuts down the internet never for it to be rebuilt would permanently shut down bitcoin, this is the case where gold wins and why gold will always retain some value. It is the preppers store of value and always will be. But short of armageddon bitcoin is preferable to gold. As long as the internet is operating anywhere in the world the blockchain will live, but even if the internet goes down world wide temporarily the blockchain mining will continue right where it left off when it comes back up. It may take a few minutes or hours to reach consensus if that were to happen, but there will be enough people with enough invested to be motivated to make sure that it does happen. The blockchain could be compromised in theory utilizing massive amounts of computing resources, but the more value Bitcoin has the more expensive an attack would have to be. Even now it would almost have to be a state actor to pull it off, and once you get Bitcoin valued into the $trillions even states would most likely not be able to do it. There are many good arguments against bitcoin, but "it isn't physical so someone could turn it off or compromise it" isn't one of them. The best 2 arguments against investing in Bitcoin right now are 1) It has gotten way ahead of itself in value and there will be a giant crash before it someday goes higher when the technology is ready to go mainstream. 2) There is really only a need for one gold replacing store of value and some other cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin will be it. And 2.5) The governments of the world will find someway to destroy it while they still can. I'm thinking maybe passing massive regulations and laws against it, to drive the price down, then use a massive amount of computing resources to attack it. I'm thinking #1 is most likely and is not an argument for never investing in Bitcoin, just not investing now. I called the last one 2.5, because that would just cause #2 to happen. A state-actor resistant coin would need to be invented which somehow limits 51% attacks, I'm not sure how that would work. But I don't think the government (any government capable of doing this anyway) will try it. I think it is more likely that CB will eventually start buying it to diversify their reserves.

There isn't much point in switching to government issued digital currencies. I can already pay instantly with Apple Pay. I can pay almost instantly with credit/debit cards and if I pay my balance every month (which I do), not only does it not cost me anything, but they pay me to do it. Why would I care if there was a fedcoin dollar or not? What makes people care about Bitcoin is that it is digital gold and not state/corporate controlled. i am not saying you would care. i am saying that the fed/treasury would care Yes, they might issue dollars on a blockchain and it might even make the their whole system more efficient. But that would have no effect on Bitcoin. Bitcoin has value not because it is on a blockchain and the dollar isn't, but because it isn't issued by a central bank. I guess I'm not sure what you are asking?

There isn't much point in switching to government issued digital currencies. I can already pay instantly with Apple Pay. I can pay almost instantly with credit/debit cards and if I pay my balance every month (which I do), not only does it not cost me anything, but they pay me to do it. Why would I care if there was a fedcoin dollar or not? What makes people care about Bitcoin is that it is digital gold and not state/corporate controlled.

I understand that the #of bitcoins is fixed, but this does not answer my question. Creating these cryptotokens is like creating money, as long as those tokens have a value and there is no economic benefit created (at least for the time being) with these tokens. This makes it inflationary in the real world. So the addition of these new currencies/stores of value on top of all of the currencies/stores of value already existing in the world is inflationary. I agree. I think any value these new currencies capture long term will come at the expense of something else, I would expect a decrease in value of fiat and precious metals. I think gold will be reduced in value somewhat, but gold will still have value because it has a feature Bitcoin doesn't (i.e. you still have it when the electricity goes out or the internet goes down), it is the best non-digital store of value. I would expect other metals like silver and copper to lose all value over the value they have as a commodity for industrial/commercial uses. I think the majority of value loss will come from fiat currencies as they will be used only for transactional purposes and lose all store-of-value uses almost completely and probably lose much of their transactional value to one or more altcoins as well.

If fiat is all we need, why do people still hold gold? Why do central banks still hold gold? Fiat is an OK form of monetary exchange, but is a poor store of value. Beware of anyone who starts off their argument with "gold is valueless" despite thousands of years of history to the contrary. It reminds me of how before the law of diminishing marginal utility was understood economists could not understand why diamonds were worth more than water or air. Just like physics, the laws of economics function the way they do whether anyone understands them or not. You can think gravity doesn't make sense, but the piano is still going to fall on your head if the rope snaps and you are under it.

"No, you should not invest in Bitcoin. The reason is that it’s not an investment. Just like gold ..." Part of my thesis for investing is that it is just like gold (only better). I'm glad he agrees. He goes on to say: "It’s all the same stuff that people say about Gold, which is also a totally irrational waste of human investment energy." He completely discounts having a secure non-state (or corporate) controlled store of value as being irrational and worthless. I couldn't disagree with him more.

Thanks for posting this Add another +1. Thank you. I'm heavily invested in Ethereum and yet I am having a hard time seeing where he is wrong.

You are misunderstanding Gresham's law. Bad money doesn't destroy good, bad money drives out good (from circulation). It doesn't destroy the value of the good money, in fact it makes it harder to get and thus increases its value. It is always easy to use the good money if you wish to because the demand is so high. It is just that people will tend to save the good money and spend the bad. so you are saying the proliferation of mini-me bitcoin is good for bitcoin? It is at best slightly good and at worst has no effect. Does the existence of silver, copper, tin, and shiny seashells devalue gold?

You are misunderstanding Gresham's law. Bad money doesn't destroy good, bad money drives out good (from circulation). It doesn't destroy the value of the good money, in fact it makes it harder to get and thus increases its value. It is always easy to use the good money if you wish to because the demand is so high. It is just that people will tend to save the good money and spend the bad.

Buying from an ATM is easier and much quicker (if you have one nearby that is). You can download your wallet, put money in to the machine, and you have bitcoin. You can still keep track of your cost basis and pay your taxes after you sell. You can still open up a Coinbase account later and transfer your bitcoins in to convert back to $USD. If you go through a company such as Coinbase you will need to setup an account (like you have already discovered) verify your ID, SSN, email address, etc. Then you will need to link your bank account which will take a few days. Then when you buy bitcoin from Coinbase it takes something like a week to show up in your account. They also have limits to the amount you can buy/sell in a day/week/month. So with an ATM you have bitcoin in minutes(even if it takes an hour to be fully confirmed at peak times, it is usually less), with Coinbase it will take you over a week from the time you first setup your account until you have bitcoin in your account. The downside of the ATM is that the fees are usually much higher. So you will save money in the end if you go the Coinbase route (if bitcoin doesn't shoot up in price by the time you get your account setup and your bank account linked and the money transferred in). Another way to buy bitcoin is to find someone who is willing to sell you some. This can be as quick and easy as the ATM and potentially cost you less (depending on the deal you make), but it can be dangerous meeting a stranger with cash in hand. If you go this route try craigslist or http://localbitcoins.com/ for people in your area selling bitcoins. I have never done this, but I know people who have. If you do use Coinbase and are worried about them being hacked, after you have your bitcoin in your coinbase account transfer it out to your own private wallet. This is what I do. I use coinbase to buy, but I don't store it there. Coinbase has never been hacked, but it is always a possibility.