Quote from: jlsminingcorp on July 25, 2013, 08:41:36 PM

Hi SebastianJu, I'm not sure about how others get their BTC, but I've not been able to find a cheap way to buy them from the UK yet - maybe others have suggestions (via CurrencyFair??, this seems as though it would be slow though). I've had good experiences with bitstamp and their fees are quite reasonable, but we get ripped off by UK banks for the SEPA transfers and GBP-EUR exchange required to get funds to bitstamp. UK banks seem to have some special arrangement that enables them to ignore European agreements on SEPA transfers and so they charge large fees for this (mine charges a flat fee for each transfer that means only reasonably sizeable transfers make sense, otherwise the % charge may be several %). If you add on top of that the poor GBP-EUR exchange rates that the banks offer then it can easily cost 5% or more to buy BTC. Unfortunately very little of that goes to BTC-friendly causes, most goes straight to the bank Angry

. It actually makes me quite angry that our banks can "opt-out" of the SEPA, but this is probably not the place for me to rant about this Grin

.

Yes, we're veering off topic. It can be done, very cheaply even in the UK.
Citibank UK EURO Current Account (Monthly fee about £8 or free if you push £1800 per month through it)
Transferwise (referral link) http://transferwise.com/u/6de1 to convert GBP into EUR (pretty much at the wholesale spot rate plus a couple of quid)
SEPA transfer from Citi EURO account to wherever (e.g. Bitstamp/Burnin) - FREE.

The downside is it takes about 5 days to get GBP into BTC, especially if I've not got a float in the EUR account.

Other UK alternative is Bitbargain https://bitbargain.co.uk/tutorial?r=tigerbit
Sometimes there are sellers that are selling close to MtGox bid price, but volumes are lower obviously. More expensive, but safe and FAST - UK faster payments or Barclays PingIT mean transactions often take just a matter of minutes.