Bitvavo: EASY Crypto Access

Yesterday I visited my best friend and helped him buy his first 20 Euros worth of cryptocurrency. Finally. At last. Took some time though; I made a Coinbase account for him almost two years ago, right after I got involved with Satoshi's vision.

I also made a blockchain.info wallet for him, and transferred 5 Euros worth of BTC to this wallet; he has seen this amount rise to above 30 Euros during the 2017 bull-run and back down again to around 8 Euro's yesterday. His reluctance to really dive into the world of crypto-currencies was due partly because of this huge volatility, must of which followed a steep downward trend from early 2018 on, but part of it has been my fault; the choice of Coinbase and Blockchain.info as the first steps into this sphere was completely wrong.

"Wrong" is not the word exactly; these were the apps I used myself at the time, and not much else was available as an alternative to Coinbase as a gateway for transferring Fiat money into crypto-currency. But the Blockchain.info online wallet was simply wrong, as this was, and still is one of the most user unfriendly wallets available. I haven't used it anymore since over a year, and use the Exodus wallet instead, which has been developing into a very nice looking and user friendly wallet with support for a growing number of tokens.

So yesterday I finally introduced my friend to Exodus, as he has indicated to me that he wanted to try diving into crypto-currencies once more. I pointed him to the website and he installed and configured the wallet all by himself in the space of a couple of minutes. After saving his login and recovery phrase on a usb-stick, he produced the login for the blockchain.info wallet, which he had saved on a Onedrive disk; I of course told him to remove any sensitive information from there immediately and instead save that stuff locally on an external medium. But once he logged in to that wallet, it was but a couple of mouse-clicks later that he had transferred the 0.0022 btc to his brand-new Exodus wallet, after which he started the backup procedure which gave him his 12 word recovery-phrase.

He also wanted to buy 20 Euros worth of additional crypto, and he had heard from a colleague at his workplace that EOS and Tron were good candidates; I had no objection to that assessment at all. But all he had was that Coinbase account... He did have the login for that account, but in the meanwhile he had removed his Google Authenticator app from his phone. No matter what we tried, we couldn't immediately get back in there. Luckily, that same colleague who pointed out EOS and Tron, also mentioned a Dutch exchange, called Bitvavo, so we gave that a try...

"Deposit euros and instantly buy digital currency at any moment." This is what's promised by Bitvavo, and boy do they deliver! Within 5 minutes he had created the account and, using iDeal, he had 20 Euros worth of Tron! The only thing that wasn't almost instant, was the KYC part, which we had to go through when he wanted to withdraw his TRX to the Exodus wallet. After uploading the ID, it said on the site that it would take just a couple of minutes, but after waiting half an hour, it was time for us to finish some races we never did in the latest Forza game...

Today I called him up, to ask if he had been able to withdraw his TRX yet, and he said that only an hour after I left he got the confirmation email from Bitvavo, and that his TRX is now happily sitting in Exodus. He also told me how easy he thought everything went, especially compared to what he experienced the first time, using Coinbase and Blockchain.info. Steem, EOS, Tron and other blockchain platforms on which DApps can be built have the right idea of promoting crypto adoption through those DApps, but my experiences with my friend reminded me of that first step of converting Fiat to crypto, and how that's a huge hurdle for people who are interested, but are not early adopters or primarily ideologically motivated.

I'm glad to see this space become more user-friendly as time progresses. For all EU residents, I suggest you take a look at Bitvavo if you're interested in taking your first steps into the world of crypto-currencies, or if you want to introduce someone else. And if you do, please take this advice I also gave my best friend: invest only money you can afford to lose so you do not have to worry about the volatility, and so you can regard your crypto as a superfluous savings-account with extreme growth potential. And that's besides, on top of the ideological reasons to help build a future for free people with real money that's not controlled by highly centralized power-structures.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep steeming!