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Comment by sidko | Hacker News Reader

If you're a Coinbase user, please don't use Coinbase to buy. The fees are really high. Instead, use GDAX. Your Coinbase account is sufficient to register with GDAX and all your privileges like limits, KYC, etc. is carried over.

It supports both Market Orders and Limit Orders. Transfers from GDAX to Coinbase are instantaneous and off-blockchain, so there are no fees.

As a bonus fun fact, if you transfer BTC from GDAX to your personal wallet, there is no Bitcoin network fee charged to you. However, if you use Coinbase, you'll end up paying a lot more in fees than you must because Coinbase uses very inefficient fee-estimation systems and still haven't deployed SegWit or batching which would reduce network fee for their customers.

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This is good advise. The problem right now is getting verified on gdax takes a really long time and doesn’t accept government ids like greencards.

I have a coinbase account that I can buy with but I am stuck at the verification stage on gdax..

> Accepted ID types: For our US customers, you must submit one state-issued driver's license or ID card.

Not sure about GC, but it's quite common to have either a driver license or a non-driver license state ID. It might even accept Real ID which is something you can get through DMV. If you live in the U.S. I highly recommend have a state-issued ID (Real ID would be a wise one at this point for future domestic traveling).

They rejected my GC and I came across another hn reader who had the same issue. I know this from first hand experience with gdax.

I’m renewing my drivers license next month so this problem will go away. Just letting others on hn know as you can be stuck in a verification queue for a long time.

Why don’t you just walk into your next best DMV and get an ID? Doesn’t need to be a driving license...they can easily also just issue a ID.

That’s what I am doing. I have an appointment booked. I don’t own a car so I had let my old ID expire.

How did you buy beer or fly?

With my greencard or Irish passport.

This is good advice but there are countries that support Coinbase but not GDAX (Australia is one of these).

Would you recommend GDAX over an alternate such as Kraken?

Kraken has gotten better since their big rewrite (just this year), but it's still not as great as other options (like GDAX). It is better than it was though. Also, Kraken has margin trading (and shorting), and GDAX doesn't (if you want to use those tools).

I tried using Kraken a few months ago and their website was down frequently and the crypto withdrawal functionality was also frequently not working/unavailable.

Coinbase/GDAX has been gone down a few times but not at the frequency/duration I experienced with Kraken, YMMV.

It's a lot better now after the recent upgrade. It also remains the only usable option for CAD funds.

Agreed. Kraken has been terribly unstable. What about Gemini, any thoughts on that exchange?

Gemini is ok, but less volume than GDAX and I'm not sure they have a free type of orders. Also Gemini's interface is personally less interesting for day trading. But to that point GDAX's graphing interface is a bit odd and represents data differently than say trading view.

Trading view is by far the best to check out a coin, see its indicators etc imo.

Still I think it's good to diversify your funds over various exchanges, just in case of a hack.

Doesn’t Gemini have an advantage to gdax in the way funds transfers work? A friend was telling me about this but I have yet to try it, I’m still in a queue to be verified for Gemini.

Kraken did a massive upgrade so it doesn't have issues like it used to. People haven't come back yet however, and the spread is pretty bad. It's the only exchange I've found to support margin trading and shorting for US customers which is why I went back.

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