I spent last weekend learning all about Bitcoin and am excited to use them to purchase some web-based services. But alas I'm stumbling on the most fundamental part: how do I buy them?
I paid cash for a pre-paid VISA this morning, bound that card to a PayPal account, and was psych'd to start buying coins, but was bummed to discover that:
(1) PayPal wants to charge me a $14 fee to transfer $500 to a seller (rip off!)
(2) No seller wants to use PayPal because the buyer has the ability to nix the payment retroactively using a "charge back" (strange that they'd allow people to do this, but ok)
(3) This forum indicates that #1 and #2 are moot anyway because PayPal's terms of service don't allow for BTC purchases.
Yeah, I blew it. But what are my alternatives? I could use a bank account via an online exchange but that requires a lot of legal documentation and philosophically flies in the face of the whole "anonymity" feature of Bitcoin.
A lot of people are doing face to face transactions via a localized transaction match-making service. Is this really the way to go? Seems like that would make sense if you were transacting $50-$100 but what if you wanted to do $5k-$10k? I'm not Walter White. I don't have fat stacks of cash laying around. :)
What other alternatives do I have to purchase bitcoins?