HOW TO BUY AND STORE BITCOINS
Just like with gold, in purchasing and storing the asset, you may want to
make use of different companies. In fact, you may not want to make use of
any company at all to store your bitcoins! But let’s start at the beginning:
BUYING YOUR FIRST BITCOINS
The easiest way to manage the purchase and sale of Bitcoin is to open
an account with a reputable Bitcoin exchange. The process of opening an
account is similar in many exchanges and usually requires a passport copy
and, in case you want higher deposit and withdrawal limits, a proof of
residency.
If you are a U.S. citizen, we recommend either Coinbase, for the buy and hold
types, or Coinsetter, if you enjoy trading as well.
In Europe we recommend Kraken, which has the deepest EUR/BTC orderbook.1 Also the Dutch online shop Bitonic has a good reputation.
In Asia we suggest starting your Bitcoin journey with BTCChina or Itbit.
If you are from a country with more difficult access to the Western banking
system, chances are high there already is a fairly reputable Bitcoin shop in
your country that can help you out.
Finally, if you are looking to invest in Bitcoin for amounts over $50,000, you
may want to consult with one of the Bitcoin funds. The most well-known is
Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Investment Trust, which has about 130,000 BTC under
management. Lesser known alternatives are the Global Advisors Bitcoin
Investment Fund on the island of Jersey, and Malta-based Exante. The latter
was an early adopter with reportedly over 90K in Bitcoin under management
in late 2013.
STORING YOUR BITCOINS SECURELY
Unless you’ve invested only a very small amount, it’s not advisable to let
your bitcoins sit on the exchange after you’ve purchased them. Even though
the current exchanges have much better security practices than one or two
years ago, almost none are insured against theft and hacks still happen on a
fairly regular basis.
For storage, the easiest first step is to make an account with Bitcoin bank
Xapo. Their vault service is currently free of charge. We like Xapo for several
reasons. Its founder and CEO Wences Casares has an impressive 20 year
track record as an Internet and fintech entrepreneur. Having grown up in an
unstable Argentina, he has experienced firsthand the importance of decentralized storage of financial assets. Xapo has raised over $40 million and is
likely custodian of the largest amount of bitcoins in the industry. Further, the
bitcoins Xapo safekeeps for its clients are fully insured by third party insurance companies, and its corporate headquarters is located in Switzerland.
The Bitcoin bank has rigorous security procedures, part of which is to store
their private keys in multi-sig form in vaults in Asia, the United States, and
South America.
For those who prefer to take Bitcoin storage in their own hands, we recommend additionally buying a hardware wallet. This is a device that allows you
to keep your private keys completely offline (protecting you from thieves
using spyware), while still enabling you to keep the flexibility of an online
wallet.
Our favorite hardware wallet is the Trezor device, designed by the creator
of the first Bitcoin mining pool. With it in hand, a quick pin code gives you
access to all your coins. And should you lose it, you can completely regenerate your wallet by using the 12 word recovery code. Trezor’s entire operating
code is open-source, which means that anyone can verify that there are no
backdoors installed that could allow third parties to snoop into your personal finances.