Topic: I am underage and having extreme difficulty buying Bitcoin. Help a kid out! (Read 549 times)

Whether or not one needs to show ID depends on which country you live in and how the laws of that country regulate BTC ATMs. I have mentioned this before - In my country you cant buy from a bitcoin ATM unless you have ID and are over 18.

Technically speaking, you can purchase crypto from resources that do not require proof of age. These would be
BTC ATMs (there aren't that many, but if you can find one, this is your best bet). You can also consider PayPal or Ebay to buy small amounts, however you might pay dearly and be sure to check the sellers ratings before forking over any cash.

**I do not advise meeting up with strangers (especially alone) to do any transactions.

Good luck! 

Who the hell contaminated your mind with that harmful currencies? Don't ruin your life kid.

Thanks for all the support and recommendations. Even the negative ones... I kind of deserve it. I am starting to get over the loss and move forward. Still balls deep into everything crypto though

A lesson for anyone of any age. They send you the coin. They wait until you get it. You give them the money. They don't like it..leave (with your money). Always take a friend or more with you.

Just study now. You will get oppurtunity to earn in future but not that study

Read the entire thread.  Previously suggested with explaination from OP!

Ask your guardians to help you out in this matter.

I am so sorry about what happened to you. That really stinks. I'm glad you didn't get physically hurt.

Have you tried getting involved in Steemit? It's a social network platform that pays you to post (based on upvotes). You would have to work it and gather a following, but it's generally easier to profit there than YouTube. You can write blog posts once a day or once a week. Once you've picked up a bit of Steem Power, you can also delegate it out for pay via minnowbooster.net.

As far as I know, none of these things need verification. I think the normal way to register on Steemit is to verify with a cell phone, but you can bypass that by setting up an account with annonsteem if you're willing to pay a bit. Annonsteem is a legit service I've used multiple times. Just make sure you save all your keys on Steemit because you can't recover them if lost, which would stink if you'd accumulated a bunch of money in your account.

So, you'll be paid in STEEM and SBD. This doesn't solve the problem of how to exchange it, but you will eventually not be a minor, maybe in a few years. So, you can accumulate now and then once you're of age you can register on a trading platform and verify and all that.

Don't indulge in adult business kid. Go and study

If you don't want to tell your parents about your interest in BTC, you can just have them setup a bank account for you and tell that you will only need to for your savings. Afterwards, you can use it to buy BTC and put it on exchanges.

You can still buy but having someone mature as your looker

What about setting up a small mining rig? If your parents let you buy a video card then you can mine with it to make coins.

Some good cheap video cards are the AMD RX 550 or RX460's. If you're able to get something nice like a 1070ti or a Vega 56 you could get coin much faster.

You must be careful out there..lots of scammers. Sorry that you had to learn that the hard way. But hey that's life. When I started out I invested in a pretty good ICO. So got the myetherwallet address to receive my coins. Guess what? Never saved the private key. I can see my coins laughing at me but I can do nothing with it. But believe me I learned my lesson. Now I save everything and write it all down separately. Maybe not the same but still a lesson. Goodluck

Even if you are underage you have plenty of methods to buy Bitcoins, so don't worry!

First, you may arrange a deal with some user here on bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=53.0
Almost nobody will ask if you're underage or not.

Also, depending on where you live, you can buy Bitcoin with cash finding a local seller.

Another good option is to go on the website I have in my signature and buy Bitcoin there. Since it requires no identity document, you can use it even if you are underage.

Hello,

I don't know in which country you live. If it's near Switzerland you can buy bitcoin with ease. You only need to find a train station and have a phone to receive sms. But your are limited to 500 CHF(~430€) per day. https://news.bitcoin.com/switzerland-densest-bitcoin-atm-network/

Some guys burgled me for 30'000.- 10 years ago. I know it was someone around me but I had no evidence. So I know how it feels. The only thing you can do, is to learn from your mistakes so that they do not happen again.
Give me your wallet address I will send you some satoshi シ by solidarity. Try to buy a GPU for mining as gotminer said. You can make 3-6$ a day with a GTX1080 if you mine the right coin and even more if the price raise.

Good luck.

Unfortunately legit exchanges that dont require verification dont exist. It is law in probably all countries that verification is required. Sorry that you got scammed man, hope you didn't lose all your money.

Your best solution is probably to just mine the BTC. You can go via nicehash and earn btc like that. Take what money you have left and build a rig. If you cant have a mining rig in your house just upgrade your PC. your parents will never know (take into consideration the power bill though).

If you look around a bit you can probably find some really profitable coins to mine.

Take your time to learn while you get ready to earn some BTC, knowledge is worth more than capital investment.

Read about any crypto before you put ur money just take ya few hours to know what u are investing in. Many crypto out there just don't worth ur cash and time wastage would always be the price to have paid

Why did you not do it through localbitcoins, paying by the bank.
Man, you could have gotten into much more trouble, so just be happy that you didn't get hurt, money will come.
I feel sorry for you.

I've used HitBTC and Cryptopia to transfer my mined coins from a wallet to their exchange.  Traded them there and then I send them to Coinbase if I want to buy and hold BTC or cash out in USD.  You'll have to mine the coins you want to trade to begin with though.  If you're trying to convert fiat into crypto on any exhcange, you have to a bank account or credit card.  And when you cash it out into fiat, you'll have to have a bank account to send it to.

Could you point to a few legit exchanges that dont require verification? Thanks.

Not trying to kick you while you're down or anything.  Just please don't go the shady route again.  Those guys could have just as easily been honest people, but unfortunately there are probably way more dishonest people than honest ones out there. 

I wish I would have thought of this before you got scammed, but you should have just bought hardware and got into gpu mining.  No age restrictions on mining into a pool and no age restrictions on setting up wallets.  Your investment would have been in the hardware, but you would be getting paid back for that investment in the coins that you mined.  You would have the coins you mined in your own cold storage and there are even some legit exchanges that don't require verification until you start doing high dollar amount trades.  I'm kicking myself for not suggesting that to you, because it's a decent way for someone under 18 to get into the crypto world, especially if they have tech knowledge.

Yeah... Looking back I realize that now. I got excited about the tanking prices...

Didn't anyone try to talk you out of doing this?  Anyone could have seen that scam coming from a mile away, so I'm not sure why you didn't.  Hate that it happened to you, but damn man.  You have to be smart about stuff.

It is true that the transaction takes time to confirm. After 5-10 block confirmation you should see it in your wallet. Now due to high costs the network is more delayed than before. I hope you did not get scammed. If they scanned barcode and did transaction, you should get the btc. If not, use someone as a escrow provider in future. You can look for btc trading groups in telegram or watsapp. Dont forget to use some trusted member as a escrow.

I am a teenager and as I mentioned my situation with parents/guardian are not standard.

If you are still a child and not yet a teenager, I suggest trading bitcoin in the care of your guardian, after all, all investments are risky.

that's unfortunate. the network congestion is all the more reason not to accept payment without confirmation. low-fee transactions can be double-spent pretty easily. in a situation like this, you should always have your wallet open. if you don't see an incoming transaction, don't take their word for it. and if you do, but the transaction is unconfirmed, don't pay until it's confirmed.


wow, that's awful. sorry to hear that. over that amount, i'd probably go to the police, but you're right. even if they get caught, the chance of recovery is small.

the lesson here: take baby steps. 3800 euro is quite a lot to risk when you've never done this before. facebook is a bad venue for this as well. localbitcoins, which has a good reputation system, is a better way to go.

You can get over the loss of money, probably when you get some cash again or the amount of bitcoin you planned to get; but you will likely remember how you were scammed for very long time.
I still remember how I was scammed some 5 years ago - and it wasnt that much in $

Yeah... The police will definitely get a adult involved. I dont want to go into detail here on why I dont want to involve my parents/guardians and why I would be in trouble. The net damage of going to the police might be higher than the gain.

I would probably go to police, but its pain and lots of time.+ Im not sure what they do when people are underage (would they call for parents to be present as well.? i have no idea)
Those scammers probably know very few people would go to police, so they count on it.

How long did it take to get over the loss and get back on the horse?

3800.- Euros (Been saving it up for a while) I am sure the police would investigate and maybe even catch the guys but I am probably not the only one they have scammed and owe money to. If I had to guess they looked like they live a "fast" lifestyle and burn money quick. Usually in the end the police or the courts have nothing to confiscate.

may i ask the amount? i dont know how it works in  your country, but here where I live its almost pointless to go to police if the amount is less than ~$500 equivalent in our local currency

We communicated through facebook messenger. I blasted them on messenger till yesterday until a point when it looked like the account does not exist any more. I am contemplating about going to the police but that would also mean that I am in big trouble. Although the hotel had cameras I am pretty sure the probability of getting my money back is close to 0.

Sorry, man, that sucks. Your other option would be to hang around here and build your account up to participate in some airdrops of alts that you could swap to bitcoin.

Otherwise, I'd probably go with getting a gift card and trading it on localbitcoins or paxful - but they are rife with scammers as well.

If it makes you feel any better, about 6 years ago or so I was scammed out of 20 btc. Worth a whopping $80 at the time, lol. Oh, to have those back in my wallet...

ok,  did you try to contact them after that, to tell them nothing came to your wallet?

I thought about that but since they probably never made the payment I have nothing to look up. I have pretty much nothing. No wallet ID, no transaction ID.

sorry to hear that. I was scammed many times when i started with bitcoin, i know that feeling :/

did you try to look up that transaction on block explorer? do you know how high was the transaction fee they set?

Yeah most of those companies need to verify identity.  I've had to take a picture of myself holding my ID for some exchanges. 

I got scammed.

But first, let me start from the beginning. Since most of the people recommended getting a parent/guardian or a person who is over 18 involved I manned up and approached the only adult I knew who might be ok with helping me out. My pitch went well and he was cool with the idea. We began the process of setting up a account on his name on Coinbase. I had no idea it was such a painstaking process, hence I had told him that it will be quick. I felt bad... I looked like I had not thought this process through and I was misleading. It took us about 2 hours to get to a point where Coinbase asked him to make a 8 second video of himself holding up his credit card to his face and read a script. I could tell he was not comfortable with it and I was not comfortable with it also. We tried Kraken also, but it soon became evident that we would end up in the same spot. Anyway... I looked like I did not know what I was doing so I had to apologize and abort the whole plan. I was frustrated. Bollocks.

Then became friday (22.12). When I got up I saw that bitcoins and all the altcoins were tanking. I got excited. This was my chance! A great time to buy and to get on board. Against all of the recommendations and my own better judgement I decided to find a local dealer and opt for a face-to-face deal. I found one on facebook and we set up a meeting in a hotel lobby. It was a 2 hour adventure for me to get to the hotel. There was two guys waiting for me. I introduced myself, we shook hands and started with the business. One guy scanned my QR code with his Ipad and told me to hand over the cash. I did. It looked like he had sent the bitcoins my way. They said that due to heavy traffic the transaction time was 30min to 1h (I had also read about long transaction times and it sounded logical). I made the mistake of not demanding that we wait together for the transfer to hit my wallet before I handed over my money. I asked if they could wait with me but they refused. My pleading did not work. They left.

Since the whole deal was pretty intense for me I sat there looking into infinity for the next 5 minutes. I started my journey back home refreshing my wallet every 30 seconds. By the time I was home it was clear there was no payment coming. I was and still am mortified.

Looking back they looked tense. It looked like one guy was telling the other guy what to do. It did not feel right, but I felt like I was already in too deep to abort... Maybe they would get pissed if I told them that I changed my mind. Also everything happened pretty quickly.

Thanks for all the suggestions. There are some expensive options with a few places with high fees but I guess I have no choice. I will give an update on how things went down.

i dont see a problem. why should be exchanging some pocket money from one currency into another a problem?

bitcoinkid_yo: if you can get your money into some online payment system, it would be probably easier for you to geet into crypto.; costs would be higher though

or you can ask someone >18 you know and trust to buy crypto for you (cousin, uncle, friend, older brother.. whatever :p )

1) Get a bank account
2) create a wallet in a secure way (learn how to do it properly and safely, this is the single most important thing)
3) Go to local bitcoins or whatever your country's equivalent is. Buy bitcoin with your bank account.
4) Use decentralised exchanges, like Waves, or anonimous ones, like ETHdelta. Do not go to exchanges, which require verification, and always be on the lookout for it, because, as underage, you're screwed, once they ask you for ID, they'll keep your money.

And NO, doing cash for Bitcoin transaction IS a bad idea.
You can find a way to do it.

Good luck!

Use gift cards at localbitcoin

Im going all in.         Ok just kidding.

Yes it's virwox that was a little typo on my behalf but it's fixed now. Good luck with the two sites I recommended, you should be at risk using either of them. Just make sure your guardian is aware of what you're doing and never spend more money than you can afford to lose.

Afaik you could buy a couple hundred dollars on any exchanges but your withdrawal is only limited to a certain amount every day, and that is without verification (or maybe they've changed that?). The suggestion of purse.io and virwox are actually decent though you need to pay for fees and rates that are quite high. Never do meetups on LBC or any other platform as you're risking yourself out considering you're underage. Good luck! I want to say you ask your parents out but it isn't an option for you.


it is virwox.

Thanks will look into the options. Did you mean virwox.com or viewox?

It's pretty hard to get into bitcoin as a teenager but it's not impossible. I will have to say this, the options I'm about to mention are not really ideal they will charge a lot of fees or you are not buying bitcoin at a market rate (slightly higher). So what you first of all can do is head over to purse.io and start doing orders. What purse does is that it allows people who are looking to buy things on Amazon with bitcoin. The two downsides of this is that you're buying above market rate and you will have to wait a couple of days until the parcel has arrived before you get your bitcoins. But except that it's great for underage people. The second site you could use is virwox. Thus site allows you to instantly buy bitcoin via PayPal or another payment method they accept. The downside of this is that they charge a lot of fees and you can only buy a certain amount every single day. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the reply`s all! Asking my guardian is out of the question. To do a face-to-face buy/sell I would have to travel quite a bit. I did try to buy from a facebook group but had to abort. Looking back I am 90% shore I almost got scammed. Decent sellers with high reputation want to see ID even through facebook. There is a bitcoin ATM in a nearby city but it is located in a pawnshop and one would need ID before using it. Any other ideas?

Thanks for the reply but asking my parents is out of the question.

You will need your parents to register on an exchange. Assuming you're in USA, try Poloniex. Don't invest a lot and be ready to lose ALL the money. Good luck!

I think it's better to buy bitcoin when the guardian knows it, after all that will keep you from some of the risks. Reduce the loss caused by price fluctuations.But if you are powerful enough, you can convince your parents to help you.Listen to the advice your parents gave you

I have my bank account since I was 16 year old. But they requires parents permission to open account.
Having a bank account can't guarantee that you will be able to buy btc. On many exchanges you will need to pass verification, and if you under 18, they may to not verify you. So, you need to use exchange which don't requires ID verification.
Or if you can't open bank account, ask your parents for a help.

That's what I was wondering too.  I mean ... A teenager can have a checking and savings account with a bank right?  I'm pretty certain I had both before I was 18, but my parents may have had to be involved in helping get them set up.

A cash deal would work but is selling BTC to a kid legal?
Kid would kinda risk getting jacked..

Sounds not very good, but probably only way. Only way you can skip your parents here is localbitcoins. Its also risky as underage, because someone can trick you into beliving he sent u bitcoins. Choose only sellers with huge trust.

Have your parents help you.

Hi, Does anyone here have any experience of overcoming this issue. The amount I want to park in bitcoin and maybe other altcoins is not big but also not small.

Help a kid out!