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Comment by saganus | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any experience buying BTC at Bitstamp? was it good or bad?

I am planning on buying some BTC and did not know about this exchange, so I am curious about it, if anyone can share any info on it it would be great. Thanks!

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I've bought around 4BTC across the last 2 years and they've always worked fine.

Their communication throughout the recent suspension of BTC withdrawals hasn't been the best, but I still consider them a pretty good service provider.

The up and coming new exchange Kraken.com looks very impressive. I've only been using it for about a week but their sites seems more professional than average, with two-factor auth, GPG-encrypted emails, and sensible and proportionate account verification steps. They also did not need to suspend their withdrawals which suggests that their wallet implementation is superior to what both MtGox and Bitstamp had prior to this week.

The major downside of Kraken is that their volume is still tiny.

I have also heard reports that they don't give clear indications of which territories they are allowed to trade with, so some people have signed up only to find they are not allowed to actually use the service, because of the country they live in.

I am from UK and have had no such issues. It is a shame that Kraken can't inform people up-front about that though.

In my opinion, Coinbase and Bitstamp are currently the only Bitcoin exchanges worth using. Coinbase might be the better exhange (as far as I know, it wasn't vulnerable to the recent attack), but Coinbase is unusable for non-Americans as it doesn't accept international money transfers. Meanwhile, you can transfer money to Bitstamp regardless of where you live in the world (and if you're in Europe, currency transfers to Bitstamp are free of charge).

Coinbase uses bitstamp under the hood. It's just a mapping of bitstamp to the north american market.

Really? That's news to me.

They don't run their own exchange, except presumably when their own customers happen to have matching trades. Otherwise they use bitstamp as the clearing house - they basically act as a brokerage. The price you see on their site is just a filtered version of the current bitstamp price:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mjjfb/how_i_succes...

I'd recommend kraken over bitstamp. Unlike bitstamp, kraken was immune from the malleability issues and didn't halt withdrawals.

Thanks for the replies. I'm currently in Mexico so I really don't know how that would work. Guess I'll have to find out.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/19844i/

It's as good as any other BTC exchange I guess. I mean, it hasn't closed down and run off with everyone's funds. That's about all you can hope for these days. I also have no problems with BTC-e.com, but I only day trade there. I don't connect my personal banking info to it. Instead I use Coinbase.com for that intimacy. YC-backed, also very much enjoyed this video[1] and they're San Francisco based which is very close to me so I can stage my own protest if my funds disappear. :)

1. http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/foundation-brian-armstrong-...

Excellent! thanks a lot. Edit: So, you say you didn't submit bank info to Bitstamp, so how do you deposit the USD to get BTC? do you just directly move funds from Coinbase to Bitstamp in USD, then buy BTC at Bitstamp then move them back to CB?

Oops, sorry. I actually don't have direct experience with them.

I personally only use coinbase and btc-e. Other random folks I see online[1] seem pleased with bitstamp and I've never heard anything bad from coworkers who are into bitcoin that I talk to. My point-of-view on these bitcoin exchanges is pretty much they're all great unless you can find an overwhelming amount of negative opinions about them... or they're brand new with no history to judge them on.

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1m2upn/going_to_sta...

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