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Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

I recently got into the world of Bitcoin and was really impressed with the ease of acquiring bitcoins and selling them on.

I wish trading stocks was as easy and cheap as this. This is one of the reasons why I'm too nervous to buy invest in the stock market or just put some money in it for fun, the barriers to entry are bafflingly complex.

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Interesting. It's been a few years since I last dabbled in trading, but I recall Scottrade being fairly painless. I just opened an account, moved some money into it, and then I was able to trade using their (admittedly terrible) interface. But this was many years ago, perhaps it has improved.

In my experience, the barriers to entry into the bitcoin/cryptocurrency world are much higher than the equities world for lay persons.

^I agree. I tried to buy bitcoin but eventually gave up because it was so inconvenient. Setting up an account at a brokerage firm was much easier.

The main issue for me has always been the fee for a trade and the need to have a minimum balance or whatever

This is often cripplingly high. I mean, if you're just putting £100 on, you'll wave goodbye to £10 for each trade you make. Even if you just buy one stock and sell it one year later that's £20 gone plus any capital gains taxes.

I know the stock market is for people making long term investments with big lump sums, but for people at the bottom, the barrier to entry is too high

Dividend reinvestment programs often offer the opportunity to purchase shares with no fee (I guess usually after an initial purchase):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend_reinvestment_plan#Cash...

Most brokers also have some range of mutual funds with no trading fee.

Building up funds over time is probably a better use of small amounts than trying to earn percentages trading them. For one thing, even an amazing annual return on £100 isn't going to cover a whole lot of your time.

The incremental minimum for buying the S&P 500 Vanguard fund is $100. Minimum of $1,000 in an account. Cost 0.05% per annum. That's not much of a barrier.

That 0.05% is for accounts worth more than $10,000. It's 0.17% otherwise (so still low). Vanguard also charges accounts with less than $10,000 in a fund a $20 service fee (clear information about the availability of the lower cost 'Admiral' shares does not seem to be readily available, but it seems for index funds it may be the case that you have to maintain an account at Vanguard).

Ease? It's hardly easy with LocalBitcoin. Coinbase is easier, but their commission is pretty high, yet, it's most of the time cheaper than LocalBitcoins minus the risk plus the liquidity (coming from the fact they use Bitstamp). Exchanges are buggy, often go offline during big swings, and without something like BitcoinWisdom, you can't really grasp what's going on, but often during big swings BitcoinWisdom starts to lag significantly (maybe an API lag issue, but anyway). Exchanges charge a commission as a percentage, so, let's say, on a 10 BTC trade, the lowest fee is 0.2% (after you do a significant volume at Bitstamp or pick BTC-e), i.e. you pay $20. Normally, you pay somewhere around 0.5-0.6% for low volume, which is pretty high, I think. I did buy last month a modest amount of BTC, moved it to Bitstamp, and did several transactions (lost BTC at the end), move it back to Coinbase and sold - I paid over a $1K in fees, but was over on profit due to the increase of BTC/USD. Also, having the BTC exchanges open 24x7 can really have a very negative effect on your health, lifestyle, and work.

That's why people are working on Colored Coins (http://coloredcoins.org/) to represent stocks and bonds on the bitcoin blockchain. There is work underway to allow people to trade colored coins over a decentralized p2p network. So hopefully buying stocks will one day be as easy as buying bitcoins.

TradeKing has no minimum balance, $4.95/trades, and it was fairly painless to sign up http://bit.ly/19JPLlS

Sharebuilder is ok too, but more expensive. I think bitcoins are actually more complicated to trade.

I've been with TradeKing for several years. This year they have had 2 outages and customers have been unable to login to accounts. Prior to those incidents they had been great - zero issues. But those two outages are inexcusable and cost me $$.

Sharebuilder is great when you're just starting out or want to automatically dollar cost average into positions. I started there, and then moved to TradeKing.

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