How to buy Bitcoins in New Zealand?

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Forums › Finance and wealth management › How to buy Bitcoins in New Zealand?

stenknz

103 posts

Master Geek

#138507 7-Jan-2014 14:52

Hope this is in the right forum.

I'm quite keen to get me a Bit-coin or at least part of one if that's even possible.

What is the best way to do that in NZ? I do have a BTC wallet, now I want to get me some crypo-currency to stick in it.

I also looked into lite coin but seems that you can only mine LTC and not buy, unless you go through some strange and IMHO dodgy method of transferring btc to ltc, that takes weeks and weeks to transfer.

If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be awesome. A lot of info about but would love to hear it from some one that has gone through the process and give a newbie to this currency some advice.

Many thanks,

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509 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#962514 7-Jan-2014 15:31

Yes you can buy bitcoins and litecoins and any fraction thereof.
Look up "local bitcoin" this way you can meet the person who you are buying from.
You can buy litecoins from several exchanges, well, Q answered here

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10447/where-can-i-buy-litecoin

freitasm

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#962516 7-Jan-2014 15:33

Never dealt personally, but there's a NZ Bitcoin Exchange around for some time now.

Geektastic

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#962695 7-Jan-2014 20:01

stenknz: Hope this is in the right forum.

I'm quite keen to get me a Bit-coin or at least part of one if that's even possible.

What is the best way to do that in NZ? I do have a BTC wallet, now I want to get me some crypo-currency to stick in it.

I also looked into lite coin but seems that you can only mine LTC and not buy, unless you go through some strange and IMHO dodgy method of transferring btc to ltc, that takes weeks and weeks to transfer.

If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be awesome. A lot of info about but would love to hear it from some one that has gone through the process and give a newbie to this currency some advice.

Many thanks,

What do you do with such a 'non-thing' once you have one?

And how come, in a world where everything can be copied, you can't simply forge more?

freitasm

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#962698 7-Jan-2014 20:05

I bought myself an ASUS tablet. It's a "non thing" until you give it value (in my case I had a few cents of Bitcoin, someone had an ASUS tablet and willing to exchange one for the other).

Value is subjective. Currencies need to be usable in commerce, hold value, etc. In my case it worked ok.

Geektastic

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#962704 7-Jan-2014 20:11

freitasm: I bought myself an ASUS tablet. It's a "non thing" until you give it value (in my case I had a few cents of Bitcoin, someone had an ASUS tablet and willing to exchange one for the other).

Value is subjective. Currencies need to be usable in commerce, hold value, etc. In my case it worked ok.

Ah. Sort of a form of electronic Magic Beans then?

Can they be stolen?

freitasm

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#962707 7-Jan-2014 20:16

I see you are letting sarcasm in the way of groking it.

Geektastic

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#962741 7-Jan-2014 20:55

freitasm: I see you are letting sarcasm in the way of groking it.

Not really. I just wonder (a) who is really getting rich off it (b) what the point is (but then I wonder that about Facebook and Twitter) (c) why it won't just be copied like almost every other electronic thing in the world is these days?

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freitasm

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#962743 7-Jan-2014 20:56

It's been copied already but the alternatives are not as popular.

langers1972

1039 posts

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#962781 7-Jan-2014 21:41

Geektastic: (b) what the point is

Seconded, what's the problem with the current system that required the reinvention of the wheel?

turnin

509 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#962782 7-Jan-2014 21:43

Geektastic:
freitasm: I see you are letting sarcasm in the way of groking it.

Not really. I just wonder (a) who is really getting rich off it (b) what the point is (but then I wonder that about Facebook and Twitter) (c) why it won't just be copied like almost every other electronic thing in the world is these days?

The point of it is to have an open, anonymous , encrypted currency that can't be controlled, by anyone.
Arguably - speculators can manipulate it's value by trading on the markets but there will only ever be 21 Million Bitcoins, you can't print more of them. However they are almost infinitely divisible. current market capitol is about 11 Billion ( measured in USD )

Transferring them is easy, you enter a wallet address and an amount and presto, no bank fees, transaction completed.
every bitcoin wallet contains the entire history of bitcoin transactions yet being anonymous no one knows who paid who.
The people who mined it early before the difficulty became too high were producing bitcoins for a few cents each, crunching logarithms on PC's. Today it's a different game with the entry level being about 400gh/s, you need a specialist miner, thats about a US $5000 investment and a few hundred a month in power, in a few months that machine will cost more to run in power than the value of the bitcoins it can produce, yet, those bitcoins in time might be worth significantly more than they are today, currently BTC is about $950 but by the time I finish this sentence it will be different, it can fluctuate 10% in a day (easily) early last year they were $15, yep they have crashed 3-4 times but they have always recovered too.

Bitcoin, PrimeCoin Peercoin and Namecoin use a SHA256 encription and there are about 100 smaller crypto's such as Litecoin ($25.00) , using a slightly different encryption method (SCRYPT) , these are usually mined with high end Graphics cards whilst some like Quark use a variety or combination of encryptions and can still be ( just) mined on a good multicore PC.

There are more and more businesses accepting them and for a retailer to accept them, all they need is a wallet.

The currencies can also be programmed and this is the most interesting part and where the innovation will take place.

There is a 'lot' of people getting into them , they are a very open source internety type thing and banks hate them, and that in its self might be their value :)

jpoc

1043 posts

Uber Geek

#962916 8-Jan-2014 05:12

freitasm: Never dealt personally, but there's a NZ Bitcoin Exchange around for some time now.

I use that exchange regularly (it is called bitnz) and it always works though I sell BTC, I do not use it to buy them. I have a friend who does and it works OK for him. To buy, you will have to go to a bank and deposit cash into the bitnz account with a reference to your username on bitnz. They then credit the money to your bitnz account (takes a couple of days) and you can bid to buy BTC from the sellers on there.

You cannot just do a transfer in because of money laundering regs or something.

jpoc

1043 posts

Uber Geek

#962918 8-Jan-2014 05:29

stenknz: Hope this is in the right forum.

I'm quite keen to get me a Bit-coin or at least part of one if that's even possible.

What is the best way to do that in NZ? I do have a BTC wallet, now I want to get me some crypo-currency to stick in it.

I also looked into lite coin but seems that you can only mine LTC and not buy, unless you go through some strange and IMHO dodgy method of transferring btc to ltc, that takes weeks and weeks to transfer.

If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be awesome. A lot of info about but would love to hear it from some one that has gone through the process and give a newbie to this currency some advice.

Many thanks,

If you get yourself some bitcoin, it would take less than an hour to convert them to litecoin and it is not at all dodgy. You just open an account on an exchange such as vircurex (5 mins) and transfer your BTC there (30 mins) then you buy some LTC on the exchange (1 min) and withdraw the LTC to your LTC wallet (10 mins).

Yes, you can mine LTC. If you have a high end Radeon card you can do it but don't go out and buy a card just for the purpose as it will never mine enough LTC to pay for itself. The days when you could do that are long past.

There are no sites that allow you to buy LTC directly for NZ$. You could get in touch with somebody who has LTC to sell for NZ$ and make them an offer but those folks all know how to transfer LTC to BTC to NZ$ via vircurex and then bitnz so you would have to offer them a higher price to make it worth their while to do an offline trade with you rather than use the proven online route. It would be better to do it online yourself by the route described above.

jpoc

1043 posts

Uber Geek

#962920 8-Jan-2014 05:50

Geektastic:
stenknz: Hope this is in the right forum.

I'm quite keen to get me a Bit-coin or at least part of one if that's even possible.

What is the best way to do that in NZ? I do have a BTC wallet, now I want to get me some crypo-currency to stick in it.

I also looked into lite coin but seems that you can only mine LTC and not buy, unless you go through some strange and IMHO dodgy method of transferring btc to ltc, that takes weeks and weeks to transfer.

If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be awesome. A lot of info about but would love to hear it from some one that has gone through the process and give a newbie to this currency some advice.

Many thanks,

What do you do with such a 'non-thing' once you have one?

And how come, in a world where everything can be copied, you can't simply forge more?

My friend Boris lives and works in Wellington. He has family in Vladivostok and he wants to send them money on a regular basis. He could do it by normal bank transfer but, as the amounts are only a couple of hundred bucks a month the fees are too high and it takes a week to do the transfer, he wants an alternative. He could use one of the money transfer agencies like Western Union. They are much faster - faster than bitcoin even - but they cost even more than bank transfers.

So, Boris goes to the bank and pays the money into the bitnz account. It takes a couple of days for the money to reach his bitnz account and then he trades NZ$ for BTC and transfers the BTC to his cousin's BTC wallet. On receiving the BTC, his cousin transfers them into his BTC account on a Russian equivalent of bitnz and then buys Roubles with the BTC and withdraws the Roubles into his account. It's faster than a bank transfer and costs way less. One day, we had a chat over the water cooler and Boris realised that he had just bought some BTC from me on the bitnz exchange. So, now sometimes, he hands me cash and I transfer some of my BTC directly to his wallet which makes the process even faster and cheaper.

The names and cities are changed but the above is a real example.

jpoc

1043 posts

Uber Geek

#962922 8-Jan-2014 06:02

Geektastic:
stenknz: Hope this is in the right forum.

I'm quite keen to get me a Bit-coin or at least part of one if that's even possible.

What is the best way to do that in NZ? I do have a BTC wallet, now I want to get me some crypo-currency to stick in it.

I also looked into lite coin but seems that you can only mine LTC and not buy, unless you go through some strange and IMHO dodgy method of transferring btc to ltc, that takes weeks and weeks to transfer.

If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be awesome. A lot of info about but would love to hear it from some one that has gone through the process and give a newbie to this currency some advice.

Many thanks,

What do you do with such a 'non-thing' once you have one?

And how come, in a world where everything can be copied, you can't simply forge more?

Because. Just because.

That is the best answer that your sarcasm deserves.

For those who desire and deserve a better answer, goto to wikiP and read about bitcoin and the history of bitcoin and the bitcoin protocol. Then go to http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf and read about the nuts and bolts of bitcoin and then download the sources and study them.

stenknz

103 posts

Master Geek

#963081 8-Jan-2014 10:13

turnin and jpoc awesome replies guys.

I have a few options, and I'm looking forward to learn more. Fascinating stuff

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