“Coinbase is an excellent place to get started with Bitcoins but it does have some draw backs.”
Website: www.coinbase.com
Transaction Fee: 1%
Limits: 10 Btc per day, 100 Btc per day for verified users
Transfer Type: Bank account
Review: Coinbase is an excellent place to get started with Bitcoins but it does have some draw backs. Coinbase offers a “one stop shop” for Bitcoin users. They are a US based online Bitcoin Wallet, Bitcoin exchange and have merchant tools so you can accept Bitcoin at your online shop. The design and layout of the site is very clean and easy to navigate. The advanced buying and selling tools have been stripped making things much easier to understand from a beginner’s perspective. Coinbase is one of the simplest and cheapest exchanges around but has some downsides when it comes to time and the availability of coins that they sell.
Setting up a Coinbase account is fairly simple but it is time consuming to get started. When setting up your account you are asked to link a bank account so you can easily add money to your online wallet. They offer 2 services to verify your bank account. One is that you give them your online banking user name and password and someone from Coinbase will log into your account and verify your account. This supposedly will let you get your account verified in a few hours but handing out your bank account user name and password is never a good idea. The idea of Coinbase even offering this as an option almost made me lose trust in them before I even started. The second option they have is a more traditional way of verifying your account. Coinbase will do 2 small micro deposits into your bank account and then ask you to verify those amounts. This process takes anywhere from 2-3 days. It took about 2 days to verify my account.
Now with your account verified you can start buying coins. Well not exactly. There are several limiting factors on Coinbase. One reason is that once you buy a coin it takes about a week to actually have the coin deposited into your wallet. Coinbase says this time is used to verify your bank’s transaction to make sure everything got correctly deposited. The second issue is that Coinbase only has a certain amount of coins per day to sell you. When this happens you can still put in buy orders for coins but you won’t know the price of the coins you will be buying until they are released. This seems to happen when there are large trade volumes in the market. This can be frustrating when you are trying to wait for a low price to jump on coins only to find out there are no more coins left that day.
Overall Coinbase is an excellent resource for beginners like myself. I have bought several coins from them and if you don’t need coins right away then this is one of the easiest places to go. From start to finish it took me about 2 weeks to verify all my information, purchase a coin and have my coin deposited into my account.