As some of you know from my previous post, I had two days of bad luck at the hands of the Bitcoin Exchange of Montreal due to them not having their business in order. But today it's not bad news of yet again not being able to sell some BTC for cash, as I finally got to exchange BTC for direct cash in hand! Wo0ot! Hip-hip-hooray! :)
People outside waiting to get in (after I left)
Of course, it wasn't without issues again :P
I arrived at the exchange, with someone already in, and two people waiting outside. So I got into line. Then some Frenchmen from France showed up and instead of going behind me, they go beside to wait in line. What, in France they don't do single file lines or something? You gotta line up sideways on a sidewalk and make it harder for others to walk by? Then one them kept bumping into me. Boy was I glad when I finally got into the exchange!
But like I said, it wasn't without issue. The teller behind the counter was the same person as Saturday morning. She recognize me and I asked her if everything was working for localbitcoins. She smiled, and said she had to check. I was immediately skeptical of things would work out.
Unfortunately, the teller was still having issues logging into her localbitcoins account for the business. She was trying to do a forgot password but the email was never being sent to her inbox.
Since I couldn't use the automatic exchange from localbitcoins, I ended up sending one bitcoin through the hash string manually input into the address field to send bitcoin to someone. I got the exchange to refund me the localbitcoins fee that they charge for sending outside their market. I ended up checking the hash 2 times because upon first revision I was missing a letter. My transaction was sent, and then I had to wait 20 minutes for two confirmations to be received. In the meantime, more people came in to get served while I waited.
But at long last, the teller told me there were two confirmations and that she would now prepare the cash. Yay! I got $3,000 all in $20 bills hehe, and the rest in $100s and $5s. A nice wad of cash in evelopes :)
I sold the BTC for a few dollars under the current bitcoin price, due to this being an exchange that operates as a business and they buy bitcoin's lower than the actual value, and they sell bitcoin's higher than the actual value.
At the end of the day, I think it was 4 PM, I got a message from one of the individuals I had contacted from localbitcoins read to buy some BTC at the market price. But by that time it was already over five hours too late :( He was busy becoming a dad as his child was born -- that's why he couldn't respond to me these past few days.
As for the price I sold that, it was pretty close to today's top, so at least I'm happy about that. You can see that this morning bitcoin started to rise. It went above 2575 and 2600 while I was rollerblading downtown. I'm glad I managed to catch bitcoin at its top of the day when I sold. :)
Next time I will may try to contact people outside of the weekend, as this past weekend no one responded to my attempts to sell them bitcoin when they had listings already on localbitcoins.
This was my first time doing a local meetup to get cash directly from selling BTC. I had done paypal payment before, but paypal took $60 once so I didn't want to do that again just in case ;) Cash is good. No electronic tracking of the money :) Plus selling for cash gets you more money than selling to your paypal or bank account. Most of the prices for selling BTC are higher for cash on the spot compared to digital transfers. So although the exchange gives out less than the market price, I got it in cash so that made up for it I guess ;)
Yesterday was a negative BTC selling post about my experience trying to sell for cash, but today it finally worked out.
Have you had only positive experiences in selling your bitcoin for money you can use?
I don't want to make people afraid of trying to sell BTC :P I am looking into getting a bitpay card, but they require identification. So maybe I'll stick with cash even though it's less "convenient".
Do you use cash, or only electronic forms of payment (debit, credit card, etc.)?