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People familiar with standard banking procedures often wonder how (or why) people get started in bitcoin. For those in Western countries (with decent banking options), the current scope of bitcoin may be limited but the options to get crypto are always increasing.

Amount of Purchase
Depending on the amount of bitcoin (you can buy 0.00001 bitcoin or full bitcoins), different methods for everyone’s preferred bitcoin purchasing methods are launching daily. Bank transfers for larger amounts, credit cards to buy bitcoin will depend on your country, PayPal, Pre-Paid Cards, Western Union and Cash for bitcoin are all possible.

Banking to Bitcoin

Getting the bank methods to work with bitcoin can still be difficult because of government regulation with a bank’s checks and balances. Rather than allowing people to easily transact with their money, financial regulators have created a system of monitoring and assuming illegal activity could be everyone’s intent. Provided you don’t spend your money in a way to trigger the bank’s alarms to ask questions about how you use your money, you should be fine in most countries wiring funds to a bitcoin exchange.

The higher the amount of fiat (fake paper money) to bitcoin you intend to purchase, the more likely to require wiring funds from your bank account at one of the larger bitcoin exchanges.

1. Select a bitcoin (BTC) wallet that is not associated to a bitcoin exchange to store your coins after purchasing. Storing BTC on a wallet that an exchange “technically” owns and controls has worked out badly for many former bitcoin owners who lost their bitcoins.

The most trusted and free wallets for new bitcoiners are:

2. All of the exchanges listed on BestBitcoinBuyers have sold bitcoin to thousands of people for years on our country’s bitcoin exchange pages.

Check which options for buying at larger bitcoin exchanges, anonymous exchanges, bitcoin ATM’s (we dislike the high fees on these in most countries) and any other options we’ve found for person to person buying and selling in each country. As more become available (provided they can be trusted), more options will be listed to maximize the options to buy for everyone on BBB. 

3. Check the ID and Document requirements on any exchange that requires KYC/AML verification before signing up. Some can have extremely strict requirements and delay the actual buying process a few days before confirming transactions.

4. Anonymous bitcoin exchanges, the peer to peer ones specifically, can have liquidity issues depending on your location. The amount of payment methods on bisq world wide are huge, the amount of users in your country can be limited. Pre-paid credit cards, gift cards, vouchers and many other ways to turn your dirty fiat money into bitcoin. All methods listed have been used and trusted for years world wide.

5. The process to actually purchase will be quite clear on any of the exchanges listed. You send money, they confirm funds in your user account and allow purchases for bitcoin and “crypto” on their site.

6. Make sure to transfer your bitcoin after your purchase onto your non-exchange wallet for storing your coins. If the exchange EVER has a security issue or problem with running their business (this HAS happened), you will be very glad to have your bitcoin in a wallet that allows you to control your coins.

For the exchanges most popular in your country just check our list of countries to buy bitcoin in.

Working for Bitcoin

Another option is to earn bitcoin rather than buy them off an exchange or person to person.

There are many people on /r/Jobs4Bitcoins/ if you are interested in working for bitcoin. Most developers and freelancers from other freelance sites will also have a few jobs posted and work through reddit. There have been sites trying to be the bitcoin version of upwork and elance but there isn’t one that has taken off yet to really recommend.