How Do I Buy and Sell Bitcoin?

The Evolution of Trading Crypto for Cash

When you first start getting into cryptocurrency, it can be a little confusing, but there are countless resources that will quickly guide you in the right direction for your first transaction. Basically, anyone with a computer and some time can easily buy their first Bitcoin if they so please. The same goes for selling their first Bitcoin shortly afterwards.

But it wasn’t always this easy. Back when cryptocurrency first starting attracting interest, all of these third-party trading platforms didn’t exist. So how did people start trading?

P2P Trading

While there isn’t much documentation about it, the first and only way to trade digital currency before cryptocurrency exchanges came about was peer-to-peer (P2P) trading. Put very simply, P2P trading is an exchange of cryptocurrency after a verbal/digital contract between two people rather than a person and a third-party platform.

Back when this was the only way people could trade, they would mine Bitcoins themselves and then find one another through online forums to set up a personal trade. Usually they would meet in a public location, like a coffee shop, to do the transaction. But this isn’t very efficient, and potentially unsafe.

Soon, people wanted faster ways to turn their Bitcoin into USD and vice versa. And new business startups were looking to capitalize on the new market that was digital currency.

Online Exchanges

So, unsurprisingly, third-party online exchange sites started cropping up, allowing people to trade crypto without having to seek out other individuals.

The first crypto exchange site created for Bitcoin was the now-defunct BitcoinMarket.com. It was originally suggested on the Bitcointalk forum by a user named “dwdollar” on January 15, 2010.

This new trading site, in many ways, was a guinea pig for the entire concept of third-party exchanges. It allowed early bitcoin users to test and poke at all of the holes it might have, and learn how to fix it … including scammers, bugs, and anything else that would jeopardize people’s virtual currency. It was quite literally a pioneering feat in the crypto world.

Over time the crptocurrency community continued to flesh out its resources and gained more and more experience. This allowed for creativity and entrepreneurship to blossom.

Bitcoin ATMs

Eventually, these creators and entrepreneurs stumbled upon another new and innovative idea: cryptocurrency kiosks, a.k.a. Bitcoin ATMs (BTMs). These are machines that allow you to buy virtual currency with cash, and sometimes even withdraw money — except instead of withdrawing the cash from a bank account, you are withdrawing it from a cryptocurrency wallet.

The first BTM was installed in a coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada, on October 29, 2013. Shortly after, Coin Cloud CEO Chris McAlary placed his first Bitcoin ATM on the Las Vegas strip.

Coin Cloud is now the nation’s leading digital currency machine company, standing as a symbol for the innovation that the cryptocurrency community continues to produce. And over 60% of those machines that let you withdraw cash are Coin Cloud BTMs.

Disclaimer: The information and views supplied by Coin Cloud are for educational and entertainment purposes only. We are not financial advisors, so please do your research and consult with a trusted financial specialist before investing your money.

What is Coin Cloud?
Coin Cloud is a digital currency machine (DCM) company founded in 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. With over 1,500 locations nationwide, Coin Cloud is the world’s largest and fastest-growing network of two-way DCMs, a more advanced version of the Bitcoin ATM. Over 60% of all two-way bitcoin machines in the US are Coin Cloud DCMs, empowering you to quickly and easily buy and sell 30+ virtual currency options with cash. You can find your nearest Coin Cloud DCM here.