About buybitcoinsmart

Who runs this

The site is made by dontgetrekt, who also publishes crypto security content on YouTube. It has been online since 2021 and was rebuilt from the ground up in 2026 with re-researched, sourced content.

What is on this site

Country guides are the core: one page for each country and territory, listing the exchanges that genuinely serve it, what they charge, and whether identity verification is required. Countries where buying bitcoin is restricted or illegal get a legality first page instead of a shopping list, because the useful answer there is what the law says.

Around those sit the reviews. Exchanges, hardware wallets, crypto cards, and VPNs, each with the status stated plainly, including the ones that shut down. There is a learn section for the concepts a first purchase depends on, a glossary for the vocabulary, a security guide, and a tracker of the public companies holding bitcoin on their balance sheets. If something on any of them is wrong, the contact page is the way to say so.

How we source and date facts

Every figure that can go stale carries the date it was checked, and every page shows when it was last reviewed. Fees, availability, and company status are the things that move, and a number without a date is not a fact, it is a rumour with a decimal point.

Where a claim comes from a filing, a company announcement, or a regulator, the page cites it. The treasury tracker is the strictest case: a company is listed only when its holdings can be tied to a disclosure we can point at, which is why the list is shorter than trackers that accept estimates.

When something turns out to be wrong, the page gets corrected rather than quietly deleted. Pages for platforms that failed stay up with the failure described, because that is what someone searching the name needs to find.

How we rate wallets, cards and miners

A product rating answers a different question from an exchange rating, so it is scored on different things. Wallets: the security model, meaning whether keys sit in a certified secure element, whether the firmware is open enough for anyone to check, and what the maker disclosed when something went wrong. Cards: what the card costs once foreign exchange, top up and cash withdrawal fees are counted, and whether the advertised rewards survive contact with the terms. Miners: efficiency in joules per terahash against hardware actually deployed today, what it takes to install, and street price against the hashrate you get.

Anything discontinued carries no rating at all. A score is a recommendation, and a product nobody can buy cannot be recommended, so those pages keep their status, their history and their alternatives instead. As with exchanges, none of it is an average of user reviews and nobody can pay to move a number.

How the rankings work

Exchange recommendations are curated per country, not generated. We weigh regulatory standing (licenses, enforcement history), security record, fees, local payment support, and whether the platform genuinely serves the country. Platforms with unresolved legal problems carry visible warnings, and defunct ones are labeled as such rather than deleted. Ratings are editorial scores on a 0 to 5 scale; nobody can pay to change one.

How the site makes money

Barely, at the moment. One link on this site carries a referral code, the Binance one, so an account opened through it is credited to us. Binance does not pay commissions to affiliates resident in the EU, which is where this site is run from, so that link earns nothing today. It may pay later, and rather than ask you to trust a list on this page, every link carrying a referral code says so in plain words next to the button. Every outbound link to a platform we review is marked rel="sponsored" whether or not it pays, so that attribute is never the thing that tells you.

That link used to come with preferential placement, and in August 2026 the placement was removed while the link stayed. Binance is no longer first by default: it fell out of first place in 74 countries and its rating went back to the 4.2 it held before, and where it still leads a market it leads on fees or local payment support you can check against the same data the page is built from. That is the whole point of publishing the criteria. An ordering made for the wrong reason can be checked against them and undone, and a link that pays nobody anything is not a reason.

Corrections

Crypto changes fast, and a page here can lag reality. If you spot something outdated or wrong, tell us and we will fix it.