Buying & exchanges

Exchanges make their money in ways that are mostly disclosed and rarely displayed. This section is the vocabulary that lets you find the cost.

The headline fee is usually the smallest part of it. A maker taker schedule charges different rates depending on whether your order adds liquidity or removes it, so a market order and a limit order of the same size can cost different amounts. The spread, the gap between the best bid and the best ask, is a cost with no line item. Slippage is what happens when your order is bigger than the book at your price. Instant buy buttons bundle all three into one rate that can run to several percent, which is how the same platform manages to look cheap and expensive on the same day.

The section also covers the routes in and out: on ramps and off ramps between bank money and bitcoin, peer to peer marketplaces for the many countries where card and bank rails do not work, bitcoin ATMs for cash, and no KYC services for people who have decided what they are trading away.

Dollar cost averaging is here too, since it is the mechanism behind most recurring buy features, and the one entry in the list that describes a strategy rather than a charge.