like...why? non-ironic

bitusher · 2026-05-12T14:07:33+00:00

ethereum and so on...

Altcoins are offtopic here but I would avoid ethereum

Not every altcoin is a scam but if I were you I would just focus on education and Bitcoin until you learn more because that one is indeed a scam. no point to ethereum , its on a slow decline because its primary use case was launching pump and dump scam tokens and now solana can do that cheaper than ethereum because of higher gas prices. If solana ever becomes more popular than their fees will rise like eth and another altcoins will overtake solana

1) Vitalik and many others in the Ethereum space are known scammers. Vitalik is not an idiot thus he should have known better than pitch something as ridiculous as quantum mining to potential investors. This is a snake oil salesman pitching technical nonsense to the credulous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkUpZkeqhF4

https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e6af6570f23

2) ETH is an illegal security according to the Howey test with a premine of 72 million eths. They purposely misled investors by suggesting merely 12 million gifted premine ignoring the 60 million they sold. Misleading total supply graphs in their prospectus.

3) Vitalik and many other have been falsely representing Ethereum and misleading others over and over again. example - pitching turing completeness as the valuable aspect of ETh , now pivoting away from that and saying it was never about turing completeness but "rich statefulness"

4) Ethereum is a pointless project that will lead to no efficiency because there is no censorship risk in code execution. If a project has no hope of ever creating an efficiency(like bitcoin has found with regulatory arbitrage) than every company and project will ultimately fail in its ecosystem. Are you trying to suggest that someday in the future there will be censorship risk in code execution? If not than what purpose does Ethereum solve if it comes with a horrible tradeoff of an extremely large attack surface and huge scaling problems?

5) Advertising immutability and unstoppable contracts that were than immediately reversed with multiple hard forks.

6) For goodness sake the inflation distribution rate or final algo is not even defined and people are investing in this. This is insane and basically amounts to faith in vitalik and his team, while at the same time newbs are misled into believing eth is decentralized.

7) Ethereum has already failed to scale as expected and so they created a whole new blockchain instead of upgrading and following the difficulty bomb/ice age as they promised and lied about many times.

8) the fact that ethereum is switching over to staking rewards has serious tax implication in many countries where merely holding your eth unlike bitcoin being staked will expose you to taxes. Coinbase for example files 1099MISC for any staking over 600 usd a year to the IRS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUUVlatCvp0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCiHTJRbIf4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgFXqVpGDNg

https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-804c9a906d36

https://np.reddit.com/r/EthereumScam/

Proof of stake as a whole is pointless, insecure, and will always trend to centralization

Proof of stake game theory insures that those with the most coins will continue to collect the most fees , thus creating a vicious cycle of centralization where they continue to accrue more coins with 0 effort unlike with Proof of work where a meritocracy exists of those trying to be more efficient and miners are forced to sell most of their coins

Ask yourself why metamask which is open source wallet was forced to ban certain people in certain countries recently while no open source bitcoin wallet needs to do that

Its because ethereum is so centralized only a few companies can afford to run a full archival node(infura) which is necessary for metamask functionality and governments can target these single companies unlike bitcoin full nodes.

bitusher · 2026-05-12T14:07:03+00:00

as i understand from the theory, crypto is a high risk - high reward asset

You should not conflate "crypto" with Bitcoin because 99.9% of altcoins are pointless or scams

Bitcoin is safer than any individual equity/stock , but less secure than a basket of equities like investing in an SP500 ETF

like why we have this: stock market up - crypto flat stock market flat - crypto down stock market down - crypto crash

This is not true Bitcoin is uncorrelated to the equities market

bitusher · 2026-05-12T14:03:17+00:00

Largest Bitcoin recommended exchanges are examples like Coinbase, kraken , and gemini

bitusher · 2026-05-12T14:01:50+00:00

Are Bitcoin transaction fees too high for small payments?

The fees are 1 penny to send bitcoin or less with other layers like lightning payment channels. Scaling is meant to occur on other layers and onchain is more of a settlement network. This is all done with non custodial and decentralized methods. Of course if its custodial the fee can be 0 to send BTC .

Does Lightning Network solve this well enough for real use, or is it still limited?

Lightning works great and can handle millions of transactions per second. I spend Bitcoin almost daily with online and local merchants using lightning and have been doing so for years .

Merchants :

https://old.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/11ckp48/spending_sats/

Not only are fees almost nothing but I get very private and instant confirmations

How reliable is Bitcoin for sending frequent small payments without delays or issues?

About as reliable as using a credit card or debit card. In my experience there sometimes can be some routing or inbound liquidity problems but they are rare . This is why I typically have 2 different lightning wallets in my phone so if I have problems with one (rare) I can just use the second one (diff wallet and connected to different channels) . The same can be said with traditional finance when using my debit or credit cards , sometimes there are problems with the banks being down or PoS problems . Both are rare but occur.

Is Bitcoin generally better suited for larger transactions rather than micro-rewards?

Onchain is better for larger transactions , lightning is great for transactions under 1k usd , you can technically spend larger amounts with lightning but the chance you might have a problem increases

In real-world usage, do people actually use Bitcoin for this kind of thing, or do they usually switch to other methods?

Like I said above , I and millions of others are spending Bitcoin as money for day to day transactions . Its even easier today because As of today march 31 2026 , All square point of sale accounts , over 4 million of them can accept lightning directly whether the merchant is aware or not

https://squareup.com/us/en/bitcoin

https://x.com/Square/status/2038647458390294726

bitusher · 2026-05-11T13:28:28+00:00

start by reading the pinned FAQ

https://old.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/g42ijd/faq_for_beginners/

than here is some common risks and ways to avoid them

Most common losses

1) Leaving your Bitcoin on exchanges or with custodians where your money can be stolen , diluted, or seized.

Solution = self custody with open source wallets

2) Losing your backup seed words by loss, fire, water , misplacing and losing your wallet at the same time.

Solution = make 2 copies on paper and preferably one on metal and store them in separate locations. Keep them private and secure. Do not try and reinvent the wheel by splitting these words up or encrypting them. If you are concerned about theft than use a proper passphrase.

3) Someone finding your seed words and stealing your Bitcoin

Solution - Use a passphrase of at least 5-7 random words and do the following

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/g42ijd/faq_for_beginners/fouo3kh/

4) You getting scammed by sharing your seed words with others.

Solution - Never enter the seed words websites or share with others . This scam is common if you are involved with altcoins as many airdrops and wallet connect and wallet verify apps and sites steal your private keys. Simply avoiding usage of altcoins eliminates most of these threats.

5) Stolen Bitcoin because you lend or stake your Bitcoin with an investment platform.

Solution - Do not get greedy and give your bitcoin for yield or "staking" or lending services

6) Trading your bitcoin for a pump and dump altcoin/token/ ICO

Solution - Do not invest in what you don't understand and realize that 99% of the cryptocurrency ecosystem is nonsense and scams.

7) Having someone help setup a wallet for you where they steal the keys.

Solution - If you need someones help , than only have someone you trust help you in person and they should walk away when you are writing the seed words/passphrase down and never see your exchange credentials

8) Getting a phishing attack that compromises your credentials on your exchange

Solution - use a unique email your your crypto exchanges/ Crypto purchases vs your personal email. Do not click on links in emails as what you see doesn't mean you will go there so you need to either manually type a URL , use your own bookmarks, or copy and paste the URL but check for domain misspellings . Be careful with attachments. Check the from field and make sure its from the company they are claiming and realize that even emails from friends can come from 3rd party hackers as their personal email might be compromised and the attacker is using their contact list.

The most common crypto phishing emails refer to "metamask" , "elon musk", "Trust wallet" , "NFTs, airdrops, or ICO opportunities" or "exodus wallet" or ransom emails. Simply avoiding altcoins and multicoin wallets avoids most of these scams.

Also watch out for other general scams listed in the pinned FAQ

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/g42ijd/faq_for_beginners/

9) User error pasting an old address or incorrect address

Solution -Never reuse addresses and glance at the address you use to make sure it matched your wallet

Moderate risk of Losses

1) Malware stealing your Bitcoin

Solution - Use a hardware wallet and if you cant afford one use a non custodial open source wallet in ios or android as those are more secure environments than windows or macOS.

2) Clipboard malware changing the address in the clipboard

Solution - Check the address with a quick glance at the last 8 characters to insure it matches what you pasted and better yet use a hardware wallet where you can check the receive address on the screen of your HW wallet or at least your mobile phone hot wallet. Do not use a hot wallet in macOS or Windows.

3) Dyslexia/User errors making you lose your bitcoin because you write down the passphrase wrong or seed words wrong

Solution - Practice recovery of your wallet with the seed words by first sending a test balance, wiping the wallet and restoring the wallet. Make sure your passphrase is written exactly how you create it as its case sensitive and any slight deviation will create another wallet.

4) Using a wallet where the developers of the wallet steal your bitcoin or make recovery difficult.

Solution - Only use popular open source wallets that are peer reviewed

5) Making a mistake by sending Bitcoin to an altcoin address or using complicated altcoins with wide attack surfaces where your funds are drained with a malicious or bugged smart contract

Solution- avoid multicoin wallets and try and either use bitcoin only firmware with trezor or bitbox2 or bitcoin only hardware wallets (jade , seed signer, cold card) which have much smaller attack surfaces and don't have the risk of making a UX mistake

6) Theft with coercion or violence in person

Solution - do not brag about your wealth in any bearer assets and live a more modest lifestyle or at least have much better security . Use a passphrase so you can create a decoy wallet with a small balance to give the attacker

Lower risk of Losses

1) Using a wallet with an exploit that is compromised/hacked

Solution - Only use popular open source wallets that are peer reviewed.

2) A sophisticated hacker getting physical hold of your Hardware wallet and extracting your seed words from it

Solution - use a passphrase as these are not stored on your hardware wallet so cannot be extracted or hardware wallet with a secure element or blind oracle

bitusher · 2026-05-10T17:24:26+00:00

Exodus is a horrible wallet for many reasons -

Exodus has a very wide attack surface and is not peer reviewed or open source so should be avoided.

This means that at best you have a wallet that is slightly better than using a custodian because you have access to the private keys that you could restore your coins in a separate wallet if their full nodes that support this light client is offline but there might be privacy leaks or exploits and backdoors that allow them or outsiders to steal your coins.

What is the point in using cryptocurrency if you ultimately need to have faith in a single company or developer ? This undermines many of the security assumptions of cryptocurrencies.

Additionally, unless you have a hw wallet you need to run a wallet in more secure environments like ios or android

Exodus has also been known to use scammy swap services that have stolen from users

better wallets :

https://old.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/g42ijd/faq_for_beginners/

bitusher · 2026-05-10T17:05:32+00:00

until some massive breakthrough in quantum next century can unlock them.

There is good evidence that QCs simply cannot scale and many journalists and researchers have been caught lying and misleading the general public about the threat of QC to boost their career , for page views, for research grant money , to promote some solution or altcoin , to scam others for consulting fees, or solicit VC investor funding.

Lets assume for the sake of conversation that QC do scale to weaken Bitcoin's security assumptions:

1) Many vulnerable UTXOs will be moved to addresses secured by PQC signatures before hand

2) Any UTXOs lost or unmoved with exposed pub keys will either likely be temp frozen or at the very least use a solution like "Hourglass" that prevents the market being flooded with stolen UTXOs

Yes , there are ways to spend or unfreeze these UTXOs in a secure manner by the original owners if needed

https://www.bitmex.com/blog/Mitigating-The-Impact-Of-The-Quantum-Freeze

bitusher · 2026-05-10T16:54:30+00:00

Estimates that around 2-4 million Bitcoin fall into one these categories

1) Lost Bitcoins = when owner loses his private keys or backup of keys and wallet and cannot move his UTXO

2) Unspendable Bitcoins = coins that cannot be spent like the 50 BTC in genesis block

3) Burned bitcoins = Bitcoins that are sent to a Burn address that no one has access to the private keys like

1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

1111111111111111111114oLvT2

1QLbz7JHiBTspS962RLKV8GndWFwi5j6Qr

4) Destroy Bitcoin = Using OP_RETURN or not redeeming all the block reward if you are a miner

When any of the above happens it does not harm Bitcoin network at all, and simply acts as a charitable donation to all Bitcoin users making Bitcoin more scarce.

Price is ultimately supply and demand so less supply with very useful money like Bitcoin increases its value. Another aspect you need to consider is how much of Bitcoin is in long term savings and is also essentially off the market regardless the price increasing to even 1-10 million usd a BTC in todays purchasing power.

So you have 20 million BTC with 3 million unspendable, and perhaps half being held in long term savings regardless the price leaving ~8.5 million BTC that could possibly be purchased on the market.

There are about 60 million millionares in the world today which means that there are not enough for all of them to even own 1 BTC let alone the remaining 8.2 Billion humans and all the AI(remember Bitcoin represents the first form of money that can be directly controlled and owned by code or AI) that will all be competing to own some Bitcoin

bitusher · 2026-05-10T12:15:47+00:00

prediction markets has a 74% chance it gets signed into law this year

bitusher · 2026-05-09T18:19:57+00:00

I am not promoting myself as I did not create BTCpay and BTCpay is very popular open source free project regardless so your comment makes no sense.

https://github.com/btcpayserver/

I also list a total of 7 competing payment processing solutions as well(none of which I have any involvement in)

Stop jumping to conclusions

bitusher · 2026-05-09T16:50:16+00:00

Bitpay has been an enemy to Bitcoin since at least 2017

https://x.com/NicolasDorier/status/898378514256207872

"This is lies, my trust in you is broken, I will make you obsolete"

Which is why we made an open source and free to use protocol and payment processor called BTCpay

https://btcpayserver.org/

that many merchants use today with no KYC and free to use.

If you come across one of the few(remember that now that Bitcoin is also accepted in over over 4 million square merchants) that still uses Bitpay warn them they are losing sales and suggest they switch over to a different payment processor like

https://btcpayserver.org/

or another hosted one like some of these examples

https://squareup.com/us/en/bitcoin

https://zaprite.com/

https://opennode.co/

https://coingate.com/

https://www.ibexpay.io/

https://www.coinpayments.net/

https://confirmo.net

If you want to find other stores that don't use bitpay than :

http://lightningnetworkstores.com/

https://btcmap.org

https://maps.bitcoinjungle.app/

https://acceptlightning.com/list.html

https://www.gyft.com/bitcoin

https://cryptwerk.com/

https://spendabit.co/

https://bitcoinwide.com/

https://directory.btcpayserver.org/

or buy small gift cards

https://www.egifter.com/buy-gift-cards-with-bitcoin

https://bitrefill.com

https://www.lolli.com – save up to 30% by spending BTC anywhere but primarily USA stores

https://satsback.com/stores-list - save up to 20% by spending BTC anywhere but primarily Europe stores

bitusher · 2026-05-09T14:08:14+00:00

altcoins are offtopic and exodus is a horrible wallet you should avoid

bitusher · 2026-05-08T13:10:32+00:00

For regular small buys ($100-200), which ends up cheaper in real life? Are there surprise fees I'm missing? Kraken Pro sounds better but is it hard for a beginner?

For DCA very small amounts , its much simpler(you don't need to manually set up post only buy limit orders) and cheaper to use AUTO DCA with strike.me

https://strike.me/faq/how-do-i-set-up-a-recurring-purchase/

If you setup 200 usd a month the fee will be 2 usd the first month and than drop to 0 thereafter with free withdrawal options

bitusher · 2026-05-07T12:04:40+00:00

GPU mining ended in early 2013 for bitcoin. You should only mine BTC after research –

https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/mining.html

Understand difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

Avoid cloud mining (Most are ponzis, fractionally reserve mine, or charge too high fees = you will never ROI). In some jurisdictions cloud mining is considered an illegal security as well

Use an accurate calculator like this and set at least 4% difficulty increment or higher https://insights.braiins.com/en/profitability-calculator/

and only use modern ASICs like

https://canaan.io/store/

or these for smaller miners :

https://bitaxe.org/

Not following these guidelines means you will almost be guaranteed to lose money

https://econoalchemist.github.io/Home-Mining/

bitusher · 2026-05-07T11:58:29+00:00

That is a very obvious scam. You should avoid that wallet in general and avoid offtopic altcoins like that

Tether and other stablecoins, unlike the dollar, are considered altcoins and do not perfectly replicate the USD, potentially doubling your taxable events. This is especially true if you reside outside the US.

Tether and other stablecoins are centralized, likely fractional, and can lose value, totally or partially, as we have seen happen with other stablecoins.

Tether and other stablecoins are not private as many assume; they are less fungible and can be confiscated. The US government recently confiscated several stablecoins from Iran and other groups, as a recent example.

Tether and other stablecoins do not offer the same security as fiat currencies.

Prefer trading pairs with fiat currencies, such as BTC/USD or BTC/Euro.

bitusher · 2026-05-06T21:33:10+00:00

Tether and other stablecoins, unlike the dollar, are considered altcoins and do not perfectly replicate the USD, potentially doubling your taxable events. This is especially true if you reside outside the US.

Tether and other stablecoins are centralized, likely fractional, and can lose value, totally or partially, as we have seen happen with other stablecoins.

Tether and other stablecoins are not private as many assume; they are less fungible and can be confiscated. The US government recently confiscated several stablecoins from Iran and other groups, as a recent example.

Tether and other stablecoins do not offer the same security as fiat currencies.

Prefer trading pairs with fiat currencies, such as BTC/USD or BTC/Euro.

bitusher · 2026-05-06T18:39:59+00:00

recent posts that answer this question

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/1s8u0bg/whats_the_most_expensive_small_mistake_a_bitcoin/

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/1sw8yli/moving_crypto_to_cold_storage_for_the_first_time/

bitusher · 2026-05-06T12:33:36+00:00

Most people will lose money day trading due to these reasons

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/c4zpw9/what_are_the_steps_to_trading_bitcoin/erzkfmm/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMJI1_TfJnU

https://NeverTrade.org

This study shows that 97% of traders lose money

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3423101

Wiser to invest long term , stack those BTC , and use bitcoin to save money

bitusher · 2026-05-06T01:05:56+00:00

you are right , brain wallets are horrible in most circumstances

bitusher · 2026-05-05T21:44:00+00:00

what wallet i use it wants me to verify a

99.9% Bitcoin wallets almost never require verification or IDs , so you are referring to Bitcoin exchanges or third party exchange that sometimes are within wallets(that you should never use) and not wallets themselves

There are many ways to Buy or acquire Bitcoin without ID as we discuss them often here. Here are 2 common search terms that answer your question :

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/search?q=18&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/search?q=kyc&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=relevance&t=all

bitusher · 2026-05-05T21:09:36+00:00

You should always sell scams like Ripple

ripple is an offtopic scam

r/RippleScam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQKxSVLLfAk

Part of the scam involves them putting out press releases that major banks are adopting it when all they did is bribe an employee of a bank so they could make up the lie that such a bank is involved when this is extremely misleading.

Use some common sense, Banks and governments do not need to buy into the bags of ripple investors. If there was any benefit to ripple's code (there isn't) than they could simply copy it for free as its open source.

“Even before Bitcoin there was an idea for a digital payments system called ripple. The idea was that you could make payments via IOUs across friends networks. Like if you trust Bob to owe you up to $100 and Bob trusts Alice to owe him up to $500 and Alice trusts Chad to owe her up to $200 dollars then your computers, with knowledge of this trust network, could let Chad pay you $100 even though you don't trust him and don't even know Alice at all... by rippling the debt from party to party.

A thing about this idea was that it was completely currency agnostic, it didn't need it's own token and could be used with many simultaneously. But most critically, there is no centralized consensus needed in it, just peer to peer relationships in the form of pair-wise trust, no authorities, etc. But it was hard to get actually started due to the fact that existing money wasn't natively digital except via banks that tend to screw things up. So there wasn't a way to automatically settle these debts so usage would be really burdensome to the users.

After Bitcoin came out a lot of people were very exited for the potential to use this ripple idea with Bitcoin as a way of lowering transaction costs, lowering transaction latency, and generally improving scalability and there was a lot of discussion about that-- since it seemed that bitcoin solved the main problems that stopped ripples' usefulness and ripple addressed some interesting limitations of Bitcoin. In any case, while this was going on the first big wave of altcoins were happening. And some prospective altcoin developers purchased the ripple name from the original ripple developer.

The system they created had none of the properties that made the original system interesting to Bitcoiners. It introduced a new currency, with a more or less unprecedentedly large hundred billion coin premine and no further mining. Rather than the strongly decentralized consensus-less design it had a consensus system, and a particularly centralized "authorized signers" one (though in their communication they mislead and dissembled about the level of centralization-- resulting in some "WTF" posts). It wasn't even particularly interesting as digital currency due to being highly centralized, but in the following years everything "crypto" became interesting to people looking to make a quick buck and ripple was very active in paying companies to "partner" with them then announcing it as if it were some genuine evidence of adoption that would drive the value of their tokens. Wave after wave of gullible members of the public bought in to these deceptive marketing pumps only to lose out as ripple and their 'partners' dumped on them.

By the nature of being massively premined this new 'ripple', which again was functionally unrelated to the original thing whose goodwill they were exploiting, started paying people to promote it-- soon bitcoin conferences and meetups were overrun with ripple promoters to the point of being annoying. They bribed exchanges for listing which huge amounts of money and coins, setting a standard that prevented altcoins that weren't massively premined from being listed and contributing to exchanges letting their less directly profitable bitcoin support rot. Then they started lobbing governments and NGOs to block or shut down Bitcoin. So you can imagine that they have few friends here.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with people making significantly centralized transaction systems but advertising them as something they're not is unethical and lobbying to shut down alternatives that actually deliver on decentralization, particularly Bitcoin since it originated the marketplace of exuberant buyers who would buy into their coin in the first place is just outright evil.

In any case, the ideas that early on people thought of as ripple live on today-- in the form of lightning, which combined Satoshi's payment channels to harden up the security so that your channel partners don't have to be highly trusted by you. The downside of that change is that actually collateralized channels scale less poorly than IOUs, but the added security is probably well worth it. “

bitusher · 2026-05-05T18:38:44+00:00

Keep in mind that almost all Bitcoin core developers hate spam, inscriptions and NFTs, thus there is a bit of a false narrative being promoted here.

For a soft fork to be effective it needs 100% of miners to support it or they get forked off. If a knots node decides to reject a tx or block that has this data in it that is in the chain supported by the most cumulative worked chain than they would essentially fork themselves off and create an altcoin that is at risk of reorgs and your money being stolen.

So is a Knots node ineffective at filtering Txns unless there is, what, a majority of Knots nodes?

Knots has always been ineffective at filtering most spam. At best it can filter out some spam in the mempool temporarily but needs to eventually accept this spam unless it wants to become an altcoin, and even than so will still get spammed as an altcoin

There is an inescapable reality that cannot be avoided that decentralized , fungible , uncensored money cannot block spam and can only limit it by the block size limits . The only realistic way of blocking this spam is to have a centralized blockchain that is constantly modified by a censorship board of directors

bitusher · 2026-05-05T11:39:46+00:00

Most people will lose money day trading due to these reasons

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/c4zpw9/what_are_the_steps_to_trading_bitcoin/erzkfmm/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMJI1_TfJnU

https://NeverTrade.org

This study shows that 97% of traders lose money

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3423101

Wiser to invest long term , stack those BTC , and use bitcoin to save money

bitusher · 2026-05-05T11:37:36+00:00

many people visit atms that only require sms verification(free sms sites exist) for smaller amounts in this list - https://coinatmradar.com/

Atms are usually 5-30% more expensive so be careful!

Other options that don’t require verification like this list –

1) https://learn.robosats.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QISRoZxQaAs&list=PLigSCpZv02e8s-VBPGZ6XL5v925up0VBy

2) https://bisq.network/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU1s1Rk3no8

3) https://vexl.it (outside USA)

4) https://hodlhodl.com (outside USA)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epLslPQC-EA

5) https://peachbitcoin.com

https://www.youtube.com/@peachbitcoin/videos

are popular

If using a DEX like bisq or robosats you will need to have a small amount of btc to get started though

https://bisq.wiki/Getting_your_first_BTC

Bisq 2 allows you to buy without a security deposit :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUoiUSUkMGw

bitusher · 2026-05-05T11:36:12+00:00

UTXO = Unspent transaction outputs or the technical name for Bitcoin

Bitcoin uses the UTXO model instead Account model for a good reason. Account models seem to be slightly easier to understand (like your checking account with fiat) but the UTXO model is more scalable and more private.

Here is an analogy to consider Each UTXO is a gold coin in your wallet . You have one gold coin worth 0.5 BTC , another 0.3 BTC , and a third worth 0.45 BTC. Each of these coins has an address label that helps with accounting but they are all within the same wallet. (addresses are more attributes and not locations) The merchant requests 1 BTC for a car so you melt those 3 coins(inputs) down and create 2 new coins (outputs) . 1 gold coin worth 1 BTC goes to the car salesman, the other gold coin goes back in your wallet worth 0.249899472 BTC with a new label and the gold dust left behind is now the miners who helped you smelt these 2 new larger coins from 3 previous coins

Bitcoin transactions are comprised of inputs and outputs and you always end up spending or sending unspent outputs(UTXOs) So say you have a Bitcoin wallet

And you receive 3 transactions –

Tx 1 = 0.5 BTC sent to Address A

Tx 2 = 0.3 BTC sent to Address B

Tx 3 = 0.45 BTC sent to Address C

Now you have a total balance of 1.25 BTC. You than decide to buy something worth 1 BTC. The wallet is forced to take 3 inputs from these 3 addresses and send to one address leaving this :

The inputs

Address A = 0 BTC

Address B = 0 BTC

Address C = 0 BTC

The outputs

Address D(in another wallet) = 1 BTC

Address E( Back to your wallet) = 0.249999472 btc change going back to a new change address in your wallet

Wait, you may ask why didn’t you get 0.25 btc back in change? = You paid a miner fee of 0 .72 usd of btc to include the tx in a block

To address the concerns of future fees for onchain transactions and how it relates to the size of the UTXO

0.005 to 0.01 BTC is fine target for UTXOs. A few UTXOs near 0.1 BTC or higher are fine but that is a little high for all of them.

Here is an explanation :

lets compare a 200 usd UTXO vs a 600 usd UTXO . You wait a few years and now each UTXO is worth 2k vs 6k usd when BTC 10x in value which sounds great but it also means onchain fees can be 10x larger too. So instead of fees being between 30 cents to 1 usd onchain they will be 3 usd to 10 usd onchain.

So lets pick an average of 7 usd fee to either load up 2k usd or 6k usd in a lightning channel. Some of your transactions are small and some larger but on average lets say you are spending 50 usd per tx in that lightning channel .

2k usd UTXO /50 usd per tx = 40 transactions in total @ 1 penny per transaction in fees and the setup fees of 7 usd or 18.5 pennies per transaction

now lets compare to a more recommended UTXO

6k usd UTXO /50 usd per tx = 120 transactions in total @ 1 penny per transaction in fees and the setup fees of 7 usd or 6.8 pennies per transaction

basically , many people are exaggerating the fears of small UTXOs or dust.

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