Quote from: BowieMan on August 09, 2014, 05:36:56 PM

Quote from: Jeteroll on May 09, 2013, 03:30:12 AM

Hey guys, I was wondering how you buy bitcoins. What exchange/service do you use and why? I'm a newb and want to start buying some bitcoins and I'm leaning towards coinbase because of it's ease of payment, although I do not know how long it takes for bank transfers to complete. Gox is to centralized it seems, and getting money into Gox seems to be very hard, especially with Dwolla, which has many hoops on its own. I wish I could use a smaller exchange like Bitstamp, but I don't know how to easily deposit money there, and Bitinstant doesn't help much, I don't want to drive to do a cash deposit, and the fees are high. Thanks for your input Cheesy

-Jet

There are still only centralized exchanges as of now, even over 1 year after you posted this. I think some of the exchanges nowadays are actually rather trustworthy. I won't mind buying at BitStamp or Coinbase, Kraken... But there still are shady exchanges like BTC-e where it is completely unknown from where they even operate their exchange!

I would doubt that we will every see any kind of decentralized exchange. The closest thing that we have to a decentralized exchange is LBC face-to-face transactions and we all (hopefully) know how many scams are attempted with these kind of trades (and the likely amount of scams that are successful). As long as the exchange has a certain level of trust and users are smart enough to not leave coins on the exchange for excessive periods of time, having a central exchange is not necessarily a bad thing.