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I own a cold storage wallet. I want to buy bitcoins, directly into my offline wallet (in order to avoid extra transfer fees).

I understand i have to pay exchange fees. What I want to avoid is: buy bitcoins into wallet H (paying exchange fees), and then transferring to cold wallet C (paying transfer fees). I do not want or need wallet H (hot), so I want it out of the picture completely. I have not seen any exchange advertising bitcoin buying into cold storage, that is why I am asking

Are there any services supporting this kind of setup?

blueFast
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1 Answers1

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You can generate a wallet for cold storage offline easily. You can then ask the exchange to use a public address of that cold storage as the recipient for a transaction. You'd still pay the fee the exchange demands to process the transaction though.

Standard practice is that all trades in the exchange are just bookkeeping and are not published to the blockchain at all. Simplifying things a bit: The exchange uses a single wallet to receive all bitcoin transactions for all users. Each user is credited that much in their account. Trading moves some of the balance from one user to another. Once you withdraw, you withdraw from the shared wallet to an address of your choosing. In most exchanges, you can't trade directly into your own wallet.

BlackBeltBob
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  • I understand i have to pay exchange fees. What I want to avoid is: buy bitcoins into wallet H (paying exchange fees), and *then* transferring to cold wallet C (paying transfer fees). I do not want or need wallet H (hot), so I want it out of the picture completely. I have not seen any exchange advertising bitcoin buying into cold storage, that is why I am asking. – blueFast Nov 14 '17 at 09:36
  • This is not advertised because the exchange has no way to know if a) the address belongs to a mobile wallet, cold storage, paper storage or even brain wallet, and b) you even control the private key associated with the address. You might for instance be sending money to a friend/merchant who supplied you with just the address. – BlackBeltBob Nov 14 '17 at 09:40
  • I do not want to transfer, I want to "buy into". Exchanges know about hot wallets, since they create one for you. They are "protected", with proprietary technology (which for me means "no protection"). I want to use exhange servicies to exchange currency into bitcoins, but I do not want to use the hot wallet services offered by exchanges. – blueFast Nov 14 '17 at 09:44
  • As said, I am not yet familiar with how exchanges work. My impression is that they let you buy into one of their hot wallets. I have no idea if they let you add public adresses of other wallets and let you buy into those. If that is standard practice, then my question is already answered: any exchange can provide this service. Correct? – blueFast Nov 14 '17 at 09:47
  • Standard practice is that all trades in the exchange are just bookkeeping and are not published to the blockchain at all. simplifying things a bit: The exchange uses a single wallet to receive all bitcoin transactions for all users. Each user is credited that much in their account. Trading moves some of the balance from one user to another. Once you withdraw, you withdraw from the shared wallet to an address of your choosing. In most exchanges, you can't trade directly into your own wallet. – BlackBeltBob Nov 14 '17 at 09:51
  • Interesting, thanks. That is exactly what I wanted to know. Can you put it into the answer, and I will accept. So shortly, there is no way to buy into offline wallets, since exchanges do not buy into private wallets. Transfer fees (from the bitcoin network) are a necessary consequence of this setup (if you want your balance to be into your private wallet, be it where it may) – blueFast Nov 14 '17 at 09:56
  • Is the transfer fee a standard bitcoin network fee, or do exchanges have extra transfer fees? (Not to confound with exchange fees) – blueFast Nov 14 '17 at 09:58
  • When I withdraw BTC from Kraken, I pay a fixed fee of 0.001 btc. – BlackBeltBob Nov 14 '17 at 10:00