The problem I see with bity is the buy/sell spread. Right now the spread is 61.1 EUR (!) in bity, whereas on Kraken it is 3.2 EUR.
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I registered with bit-stamp (even got verified) but struggled to find a single positive (not sponsored) review. So ultimately I went with Kraken and had no problem so far. Fiat transaction cleared in 0.5 days and the withdrawals were received within an hour (the withdrawal fees were above the regular crypto fees but still within reason).
The only real gripe I have with them, is the unresponsiveness of the trade interface at some points of the day.
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I can give you a positive review of Bitstamp, I’m very happy with them. Deposits and withdrawals are fast and free, and I really like the tradeview. The organization of the website could be improved a bit, but it’s not too bad. I particularly like that it isn’t super slow like Kraken, and when you place it actually works the first time. (I don’t know why, but I get lots of errors with Kraken on Chrome.)
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I guess a lot of negative reviews come from people who were flagged by AML policies. I never had problems with Bitstamp either, as long as you are willing to prove where the money come from with screenshots, you’e good to go. Agree for bity, the spread is terrible, but it’s because it’s more a broker than an exchange where you can trade directly with buyers/sellers.
Positive points for Bity despite the fees and spread: if you just want to buy&hold and if you prefer to send the money in CHF to a Swiss company. Kraken also went down several times during key moments. The best option is to be a verified client at several exchanges.
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Have you actually had to do this? In what circumstances? I’ve transferred money to them and transferred cryptos in and out multiple times and they’ve never asked me for any information.
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Yep I had to do this when depositing money. You will probably have to answer them at some point in the future. I think they have to do it if your transactions are flagged as suspicious or after a certain amount. Here are the kind of questions they ask:
- What is your current occupation?
- What is the purpose of your Bitstamp account? Describe in as much detail as possible how you use your trading account.
- Are you using your Bitstamp account in connection with any business/commercial related activity? If so, how?
- Do you have an established relationship with any other bitcoin exchange?
- What is the source of the funds deposited to your Bitstamp account? Please provide any financial documentation which can confirm how the funds sent to your Bitstamp account were acquired.
- Which banks do you intend to use with your Bitstamp account for fiat deposits/withdrawals? Provide complete addresses, account number and SWIFT/BIC codes.
- What is the estimated amount you intend to deposit/withdraw to/from your Bitstamp account per month (in USD/BTC)?
- Any relevant financial document which can confirm how funds deposited to your Bitstamp account were/are being acquired. For example, bank statement showing income source, personal tax return, documents/screenshots that can confirm you are receiving family gifts, etc.
- What is the purpose and destination of your bitcoins withdrawals made from your Bitstamp account?
- Are you using your Bitstamp account in connection with any gambling related activities?
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Wow, that’s a real PITA… Any idea what might trigger that kind of scrutiny? I’ve done a couple of transfers so far, both from the EU and the biggest one was for 5000€.
You asked these questions in a different thread to @hedgehog, but I’ll answer them here. 
Reasons:
- it’s growing like crazy
- it’s a privacy-wise improvement to electronic payments
- the government doesn’t need to know you hold some
Other crypto:
- Yes, more is better. I hold currently BTC, ETH, LTC, but I’m planning to expand.
Portion of portfolio:
- No, it’s peanuts (1-2%) - combined with my gold coins, it’s 5%.
How to buy:
- Currently, I use Coinbase, but it has limited coins. I’ll open soon an account on some exchange that supports more cryptocoins, so that I can buy different ones. Not sure which one is best for that though.
How to store bitcoin that it’s safe:
- Hardware wallet with backup. For example, I asked my family to buy me for Christmas this one:
Ledger Nano S Plus | Ledger (Yes, it supports storing multiple kinds of coins)
How would you interpret the current $4000 price, do you think it is still undervalued in the long term?
- No idea, initially I thought it’s a bubble and it will go to $10 sooner or later. But now when I see people using it, when I started using it for online transactions, when I see the number of crypto-companies in Zug, I started thinking that it’s undervalued in long term.
And finally, any other significant investments than the stock market and crypto?
- Yes, gold, silver, platinium, palladium. I think diversification is a key and in the future I’ll expand more into hard assets - land, real estate, forests, farms. Maybe some classic art in the future or whisky. I plan to keep 90% in a standard passive, index, world stocks-bonds portfolio and 10% in different kinds of alternative investments (5% risk ones, 5% hard assets). Maybe one day, I’ll sell coins and invest into private equity. I think it makes sense to diversify into other classes of assets and get some more risk in small fraction of the portfolio. The hard assets are for the III Wolrd War scenario - their performance is usually miserable, but they are really safe and long-term store of value.
By the way, I started with bitcoin by using a service that pays bitcoins for filling questionnaires: www.21.co . They gave me something like $10 in BTC for filling few questionnaires and it grew to $60 after few months. I was pretty nicely surprised when I discover that. Then I transferred it to Coinbase and afterwards I bought a book with it. That was my first transaction. Pretty awesome stuff.
That book is going to be really expensive when bitcoin reaches $100k, just like the $20 million bitcoin pizzas. 
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That’s why I’m gonna buy some bitcoins and keep it on Ledger Nano S anyway. 
Here a new blog article from Migros Bank about Crypto:
This is an oversimplification of an oversimplification. Also recommending web-wallets is a huge no no (are they by any chance launching a their own?)
The question about inheritance is kind of interesting though, but the same issue applies to gold buried somewhere, a private key is just a lot easier to hide, overlook or loose.
Of course, their articles promote their own products and are usually written for the “granny housekeepers”, may give a clue to people “in the dark” about a particular thema (like me in this case…
)
I that case you should probably get better sources and take this article with huge grain of salt, there are some statements that are plain wrong. But honestly I also do not know any good sources at the moment as I got my knowledge over years from various places. It is a very complicates subject and you should do a bunch of research before dismissing or embracing the concept.
I actually just recently got back into crypto and actually bought some with fiat for the first time (I only mined before). Currently I have a little more than 5% of my wealth in crypto (40% BTC, 40% ETH and 20% BCH).
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Any fundamental reason to hold ETH and BCH?
Diversification.
ETH has an actual use outside of being a currency and a completely different mining infrastructure (as of yet it is still asic proof, on the other hand it screws up the gpu market but that is another story). It is also just very cool and has industry support.
BCH I got mostly to be on both sides of the fork, currently BTC seems to be winning and BCH is crapping out but the short time losses from BCH (which are quite high) are still more than compensated for short term gains of BTC and ETH. I am however going to mostly stick with that allocation.
I also have trace amounts of Dogecoin and ETC (etherium classic) but those are just things I mined. Half my Dogecoin got stolen by cryptsy (Teaching me not to just keep stuff in an exchange) and most of my ETC got either replay attacked teaching me to take special care after forks and always trade the higher value one first. All in all those lessons were still relatively cheap comparing to doing them now.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I am dealing with a currency which, until relatively recently, had a biggest exchange that used to be a “Magic the gathering” trading forum (Which exploded in everyone face at some point).
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ETH has completely different functionality than Bitcoin. In practice, it’s a software service network with it’s own currency, where everybody can sell or buy computing services (execute any code) on top of Etherum network. For example, I’ve seen a company selling an access to their IoT devices collecting weather metrics from different parts of the world.
And BCH, as far as I know, is faster than BTC, but still compatible with it.
What do you mean with “compatible”?
As far as I know it is a fork, everyone who had bitcoin before the fork has an equal amount of BCH but other than that they are separate currencies.
Ok, I guess I’m wrong. I thought you can use BCH with services that support BTC. Stil, diversification is almost always good thing in investments, so, I’ll keep both of them.