localbitcoins works, so does craigslist. My first purchase was a creepy meet up at a Burger King. Its just the world of today's bitcoin purchases.
My advice buying face to face:
1. Bring a friend
2. Meet in a public place that is not too crowded
3. Bring your phone and be ready to check your payment address on blockchain.info
4. Insist he pay a reasonable miner fee (it is a fee the person transferring their bitcoin to you must elect to pay and this fee dramatically impacts your exchange speed). Inform him beforehand you are not going to hand over 1k, 5k, 10k or whatever when there are still zero confirmations.
5. Bring large bills to help with the counting time.
6. Don't talk about why they are selling, or much else, I found small talk to be a waste of time and seems to creep out the regular bitcoin dealer.
7. Don't use a digital wallet (my opinion), i think it creates to much incentive for stealing your phone and in general Paper wallets I find much more simple for face to face transactions. You can use www.bitaddress.org to print a paper bitcoin. The seller will read the CR code with his phone and then you can CR code with your own phone using blockchain.info and then you wait for the first three confirmations, more if you are feeling insecure.
8. Bring ONLY the public address portion of your paper wallet, do not bring the private key with you as you risk exposing it accidentally (risk of google glass, et cetera). Yes I am paranoid when spending thousands of dollars.
Once you have a bitcoin in your possession your life becomes much easier. www.btc-e.com registration is instantaneous. Transfer into your account is instantaneous. As for getting cash out, well that has to improve for bitcoin to every truly get to where we want it to go.
Topic: Harder to get some bitcoin than I expected - page 2. (Read 1247 times)
I have been using localbitcoins with no problem. easy and fast way when you have reliable seller 
Thx. I think I will try that site some more. What payment method(s) have you been using?
I have been using localbitcoins with no problem. easy and fast way when you have reliable seller
So I first heard about bitcoin a couple years ago... briefly investigated how mining worked, read that the current value generally wasn't worth the electricity, didn't expect that value to increase x1000 within a couple years, so I ignored it, but I kept reading about it and trying to learn about it when I saw posts about it online.
Decided to try to get into it this week cuz it's rising so much and even though I still expect it to correct I've been expecting that for days, so hey might as well put like $25 in it for now just to get my feet wet and see what happens, right? Then maybe try to add a little more every month or something. Plus I kept becoming more of a "believer" in the foundational structure behind it, and it seemed like the US government was almost actually favorable to the idea, reducing the chance that they would try to shut it all down. I think the tipping point was when I saw redditors instantly anonymously tipping each other micro-transactions and realizing that real value was being moved online in a way that was never possible before. And then I read the Satoshi paper.
So I actually started to look into how to trade some USD for some BTC. I passed over Mt.Gox cuz I'd seen too many people complaining about funds not settling for weeks at a time when they tried to sell back to USD. Coinbase seemed to have a good reputation, so I signed up with them over last weekend, but I still haven't received the verification deposits. My bank is kinda small and local so maybe there's some issues there, or they're just having delays from the huge increase in demand. OK, let's try Bitstamp, the other one that seems to be well-liked... I have to submit my driver's license and a utility bill? Makes sense, I guess, but I didn't have a good camera on me... plus it just kinda seemed ironic to me that I even needed to go to that much trouble to partake in a currency that is supposed to be all "instant" and "anonymous"...
I started to wonder why I couldn't just buy some via credit card or Paypal like everything else online... I googled about that... ok because of chargebacks... Makes sense I guess. Found one site that was offering via credit card but at like $200 above the other prices, and I didn't want it that bad... Found out about localbitcoins and signed up but there wasn't anything in my area besides making deposits into other banks, which wouldn't even work on a holiday and again just seemed like a lot of trouble to get into something that's supposed to be circumventing that very annoying bank-y stuff that I was having to do just to get started.
Next I found some of those "faucet" sites but you basically have to click on their silly little ad-heavy pages a few dozen times at their set paces before you get to levels that actually "pay out," which again makes sense but of course will take days or weeks.
So here I am signing up for this forum, still with 0 BTC, to try to keep learning more and hopefully eventually figure out a safe and easy way to trade for some. I'm sure some of you will say there are things I did wrong above or that I'm just being too picky about how I want to get into it for so little investment, which is probably true, and I'm definitely still very noob about it all, but I have to post in this forum anyway so I just thought I'd share my experience so far, maybe somebody can relate a little.
Decided to try to get into it this week cuz it's rising so much and even though I still expect it to correct I've been expecting that for days, so hey might as well put like $25 in it for now just to get my feet wet and see what happens, right? Then maybe try to add a little more every month or something. Plus I kept becoming more of a "believer" in the foundational structure behind it, and it seemed like the US government was almost actually favorable to the idea, reducing the chance that they would try to shut it all down. I think the tipping point was when I saw redditors instantly anonymously tipping each other micro-transactions and realizing that real value was being moved online in a way that was never possible before. And then I read the Satoshi paper.
So I actually started to look into how to trade some USD for some BTC. I passed over Mt.Gox cuz I'd seen too many people complaining about funds not settling for weeks at a time when they tried to sell back to USD. Coinbase seemed to have a good reputation, so I signed up with them over last weekend, but I still haven't received the verification deposits. My bank is kinda small and local so maybe there's some issues there, or they're just having delays from the huge increase in demand. OK, let's try Bitstamp, the other one that seems to be well-liked... I have to submit my driver's license and a utility bill? Makes sense, I guess, but I didn't have a good camera on me... plus it just kinda seemed ironic to me that I even needed to go to that much trouble to partake in a currency that is supposed to be all "instant" and "anonymous"...
I started to wonder why I couldn't just buy some via credit card or Paypal like everything else online... I googled about that... ok because of chargebacks... Makes sense I guess. Found one site that was offering via credit card but at like $200 above the other prices, and I didn't want it that bad... Found out about localbitcoins and signed up but there wasn't anything in my area besides making deposits into other banks, which wouldn't even work on a holiday and again just seemed like a lot of trouble to get into something that's supposed to be circumventing that very annoying bank-y stuff that I was having to do just to get started.
Next I found some of those "faucet" sites but you basically have to click on their silly little ad-heavy pages a few dozen times at their set paces before you get to levels that actually "pay out," which again makes sense but of course will take days or weeks.
So here I am signing up for this forum, still with 0 BTC, to try to keep learning more and hopefully eventually figure out a safe and easy way to trade for some. I'm sure some of you will say there are things I did wrong above or that I'm just being too picky about how I want to get into it for so little investment, which is probably true, and I'm definitely still very noob about it all, but I have to post in this forum anyway so I just thought I'd share my experience so far, maybe somebody can relate a little.
Jump to: