Buying EOS at the Post Office... with cash!

Another part in my series on experimenting with new crypto features, in their early stage. In this article i describe my experience with purchasing crypto in an Austrian post office with cash....:

https://www.bitpanda.com/en/togo

You might not have heard of it, but being a local, it caught my attention, when last month an announcement came out, that it was possible to buy crypto-currencies at local post offices with the support of the exchange bitpanda. Read more about that here:
https://busy.org/@conceptskip/eos-now-for-a-fistful-of-euros

So what you receive for those 50€ is a voucher you would need to to an additional steps:

Basically the voucher tells you to visit the bitpanda website, and redeem it to buy one of the cryptos they offer. 

So that's quite far off from buying acctual crypto in a local store, what i bought is 50 Eur for a platform that i can then use to trade for crypto... online. This is actually what i expected, but it is not what they are advertising. In a 2017 scenario, where some alps-dweller, who bought this voucher down in the valley, would still have missed 50%+ gains to be made before having returned home to his mountain chalet where he finally redeemed the voucher.  
Not to mention the 12 months expiry... imagine you bought that thing in 2013 and left it in your drawer with confidence you are owning crypto....So that's what i did: After entering my full name (Concept Skip ;-) and verifying my email address i was able to redeem the voucher for some precious EOS... well ummm:

The nice little tooltip tells you, that  currently EOS can only be bought and sold via their platform, whereas deposits and withdrawals are disabled until they will have set-up wallet features. I tried a few other currencies, and you cannot withdraw many of the coins offered... notable exceptions are some odd choices like Dash, Stellar, Komodo.So i did what i initially tried to avoid, i bought into BTC which went quite seemless and for my 50 Eur i got some 0.0075BTC, which including Wallet,- Deposit,- and Withdrawal fees, went down to 48 Eur, when they arrived on my EOS friendly exchange, where i finally switched them for EOS.
See here for the complete fee table:  https://www.bitpanda.com/en/limits#transactioncosts

The cool thing though; all this worked without any KYC, all i had to do is signup once with my email and neither redeeming nor withdrawal required any verification!

ConclusionAs you can see, the presentation of the bitpanda portal is pretty nice, and things work smoothly. But there are a lot of functionalities and other aspects, that remain behind the bold marketing claims. For an exchange that accepts fiat, their choice of coins is pretty broad. It also demonstrates that despite major efforts being made, crypto is quite a bit away from mainstream adoption. I believe that i know more or less what i am doing, but some less crypto affine person might have a real hard time, and quickly be overwhelmed of things that work quite differently than announced. 

Finally being able to acquire and transferring crypto completely without any KYC is an actual benefit, which despite limitations makes this an option not to be neglected, when buying into crypto with fiat!

Are there any crypto-exchanges in your country? Did you try them out? What do you think of the KYClessness?

Concluding with a little shill: Chaince is where i finally converted my EOS. If you want to give it a try, use my referral link to join 😉