Buying bitcoin is the easy part. Every exchange below will sell you some within about ten minutes of signing up. The part that matters, and the part most first-time buyers skip, is moving it somewhere you control.
The main places to buy
Availability depends on where you live, and every one of these requires identity verification before you can withdraw. Fees move around, so treat the numbers as the shape of the thing rather than today's quote.
| Exchange | Where | Rough cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coinbase | US, UK, EU, much of the world | High on the simple app, far lower on Advanced Trade | The default first account. Use Advanced Trade - the basic buy button costs several times more for the identical bitcoin. |
| Kraken | US, UK, EU | Low | Long track record, good fiat rails in Europe, a more serious interface. |
| River | US only | Low | Bitcoin-only, no altcoin distractions, unusually good withdrawal policy. |
| Strike | US, EU, and others | Low | Good for recurring buys and Lightning withdrawals. |
| Bitstamp | EU, UK, US | Low | One of the oldest European exchanges. |
| Bisq | Anywhere | Varies | Peer-to-peer and non-custodial. No account, no ID, much more effort. |
If you are in Europe and want one answer: Kraken or Bitstamp. In the US: Kraken or River. If you already have Coinbase, that is fine too - just switch to Advanced Trade before you buy.
The buy button is not the cheap option. Coinbase's simple interface and Kraken's "instant buy" both charge a spread on top of the fee. The advanced or pro view on the same account, with the same balance, is usually a fraction of the price for exactly the same purchase. It looks more intimidating and it is not.
Then withdraw it
An exchange balance is an entry in that company's database. It says you are owed bitcoin; it is not bitcoin you hold. That distinction is invisible right up until the exchange freezes withdrawals, gets acquired, or fails - and the list of exchanges that did exactly that is long and includes several that looked unassailable at the time.
So after you buy:
- Set up somewhere to send it. A hardware wallet if the amount matters to you, a reputable phone wallet if it is small.
- Copy the receive address from that wallet.
- Send a small test amount first - the smallest the exchange allows. Wait for it to arrive.
- Send the rest.
The test transaction feels like a waste of a fee. It is the cheapest insurance in bitcoin. An address typo cannot be undone by anyone, ever, and there is no support desk that can reverse it.
What this costs
Three fees get confused with each other constantly:
- The exchange fee - what the venue charges to match your order. This is the one that varies wildly between the simple and advanced interfaces.
- The spread - the gap between what they buy at and what they sell at. Often invisible and often larger than the fee.
- The network fee - what miners charge to include your withdrawal in a block. It depends on how busy the network is that day, not on how much you are sending. Sending £50 and £50,000 costs roughly the same.
That last point is why withdrawing tiny amounts repeatedly is wasteful. If you are buying a little each week, let it accumulate on the exchange for a month and withdraw once - accepting that you carry exchange risk in the meantime.
A note on "not your keys"
The phrase is repeated to the point of parody, but it is load-bearing. Holding your own keys means no one can freeze, lend out, or lose your coins. It also means no one can recover them for you when you lose the backup, and people lose the backup far more often than exchanges fail.
Be honest with yourself about which failure you are more likely to cause. If you are certain you will mishandle a seed phrase, a reputable exchange is genuinely safer for you than a hardware wallet you do not understand. The right move is to learn the hardware wallet - but learn it first, with a small amount, rather than moving your life savings into a device you bought yesterday.
Where VaultUntil fits
Nowhere in this article, really. We do not sell bitcoin, and we earn nothing from any exchange listed above - these are the venues we would name to a friend. (We do earn a commission on Ledger hardware wallets, disclosed on that review. No exchange pays us anything.)
Once you own bitcoin and have decided you want it locked away until a specific date, that is what we do: you send to an address whose timelock is enforced by the Bitcoin network itself, and it delivers on the day. Worth reading how that compares to cold storage before you decide it is what you want, because for many people it is not.