How to Manager Your Bitcoin from Germany

I thought this might be on the mind of some, so I should just write a short post about it. You might want to choose Bitcoin.de as your exchange, but they are only on their way to be a real exchange. At the moment they are just facilitating dealings between you without bitcoin and somebody else with bitcoin and you need to wire money to their accounts. This is why the trust score at Bitcoin.de is so important. With full Integration with the Fidor Bank this will be easier. The process will on the surface be the same just that people with Fidor bank accounts will have that system fully automated.

Easier and a lot more liquid is using Bitstamp to buy your coins. Yes, you will be wiring your money into a foreign country, but the exchange is liquid and you will be easily and quickly buying bitcoins without further wire transfers.

Then comes the question of where to store your bitcoins. You need to remember that Bitcoins are like a wallet and you wouldn’t walk around with thousands of EURs in your wallet either. Hence you need it somewhere secure. The safest I have found is Coinbase. First of all they raised money from Union Square Ventures, which gives them a bit credibility. Second, they are employing a different system in that you do not have a wallet there but you can generate multiple wallet ids that never really hold any bitcoin. You have an internal Account with Coinbase and they take care of moving 90% of your bitcoins into secure offline storage. And for those even more paranoid, you can use their paper wallet system to print a wallet and move it into your safe.

Paying with bitcoin is still a bit harder and too hard actually in the offline world for my taste. It was easy with Coinbase’s iPhone App, but that has been removed from the AppStore by Apple. This will of course change in the future. To keep up to date on all the Bitcoin news, I suggest Coindesk.