Buying Bitcoin, A Personal Adventure

Buying Bitcoin, A Personal Adventure — With all the talk about bitcoin we decided to buy some.

Buying Bitcoin, A Personal AdventureWe enrolled at Localbitcoins. comĀ being guided there from Bitcoin.org, a well-established site where you can also find information about the cryptocurrency.

We found a seller, Georgia-based Swift-Bitcoin, and accepted an offer of about $100 at an exchange rate of $11,276.62 per bitcoin.

Getting the coin required us to take a photo — no scan accepted– of our drivers license and send it to the seller. He thought the first one was fuzzy and made us take another. We then had to make a cash deposit at a Bank of America according to his instructions, write “No Refunds” on the receipt, and send him a a photo of the receipt next our face.

He then released our purchase and we are now proud owners of about .009 bitcoin.

Remember, bitcoin is not meant to be an investment, albeit it’s probably not a bad one right now. It’s designed as a medium of exchange with an intrinsic value set digitally and kept true by a cryptography-secured public ledger (blockchain). Just about all government-issued money in the world — including the United States — is “fiat” which means the value is arbitrarily determined by a government or government-connected bank.

Buying Bitcoin, A Personal Adventure