Frequently Asked Questions

-Payment freedom: Bitcoin has given the opportunity to people to send and receive bitcoins at any time worldwide. With bitcoin users have the full control of their money. There are no bank holidays, no borders and no bureaucracy.

-Choose the fees amount: Bitcoin users can set their own fees in order to make their transaction confirmation faster. The higher the fee, the faster the confirmation.

-Less risks for merchants: Bitcoin transactions are completely secure, irreversible and there are no customers’ sensitive or personal information contained. This way merchants are protected from any loss caused by fraud or fraudulent chargebacks and compliance for PCI is not needed. This gives the ability to merchants to easily expand to new markets where credit cards are unavailable or fraud rates are way too high. Merchants benefit a lot from this since the fees are lower, the markets are larger and there are less administrative costs.

-Security and control: Every transaction is fully controlled by its users, so there is no way for merchants to force unwanted or unnoticed charges that can happen with other payment methods. There is no need for personal information to be tied to the transaction, to make a bitcoin payment. This way, strong protection is offered in case of identity theft. Another way for users to protect their money is doing a backup and encryption.

-Transparent and neutral: All the information you need about bitcoin supply itself is available on the block chain for anybody to verify and use in real-time. The bitcoin protocol cannot be controlled or manipulated by any individual or organization because it is cryptographically secure. This makes the core of bitcoin easily trusted as it is completely neutral, transparent and predictable.

It is a lot easier to make bitcoin payments rather than debit or credit card purchases and also they can be received without a merchant account. Payments are made easily from your wallet application either on your computer or your smartphone, simply by entering the recipient’s address, the payment amount and pressing send. In order to enter a recipient’s address easier, many wallets have the potential to obtain the address by scanning a QR code or touching two phones together with NFC technology.

There are many ways for someone to acquire bitcoins. We as Bcash can provide the following ways to acquire bitcoins:

-Through our ATMs (LINK)

-Through Bank Transfer (LINK)

-Through Bcash Sale Points

In Greece the number of companies that accept bitcoin as a payment method is really small. We as Bcash are doing our best to support any progressive action in order to make the number of the companies that accept bitcoin a lot bigger.

For most of the users, bitcoin is just a mobile application or a computer program providing them a personal bitcoin wallet and allows a user to send or receive bitcoin with them. The bitcoin network is included on a public ledger called the “blockchain”, in which every transaction ever processed is contained. This allows the verification of the validity of each transaction by any user’s computer. The authenticity of each transaction is under the protection of digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses. This gives to all the users the ability to have full control over sending bitcoins from their own bitcoin addresses.

The Bitcoin network doesn’t belong to anyone specifically. It is the same as with the technology behind the email. Users around the world control the bitcoin. All the users of bitcoin are free to choose any kind of software they want, however all the users must use a software complying with the same rules in order to stay compatible with each other. We as a company Bcash are using and supporting the application blockchain.com because for us, it is one of the most reliable platforms for transactions. You can use the Blockchain wallet either as an application on your mobile phone or through the website.

Bitcoin is the first adjustment of a concept going by the name “cryptocurrency”, which was described for the first time in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list, pointing out the idea of a new form of money that uses cryptography controlling its creation and transactions, in place of a central authority. The year 2009 the first Bitcoin specification and proof of concept was published by Satoshi Nakamoto in a cryptography mailing list.

Bitcoin is a network that works with its users consent and gives the opportunity to enable a new payment system and completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is not affected by any central authority or middlemen and it is powered only by users. Bitcoin is more or less like digital cash.

-Acceptance: In Greece, bitcoin is not so widespread and many people are still unaware of it. Despite the fact that bitcoin is still not so well known, more and more businesses accept bitcoins everyday. That’s happening because bitcoin has a lot of advantages and people are keen to use it. However, the number of users is yet small and it still needs to grow in order to benefit from network.

-Volatility: The number of businesses that use bitcoin and the total value of bitcoins are still very small in compare to what they could be. Therefore, the price of bitcoins can be affected significantly by relatively small events, trades or business activities. As bitcoin markets and the technology grows and matures this volatility will eventually decrease and bitcoin will be much more stable in the future.

There is not such thing as trust in bitcoin from the fact that bitcoin does not requires trust at all. Bitcoin functions exactly the same as the real money, the only difference is the form. Every single payment can be made without relying on a third party and functioning exactly the same as your real wallet. The difference is that it is electronic and the whole system is protected by heavily peer reviewed cryptographic algorithms that provide you with even more security.

With the bitcoin becoming so big and growing so fast many people want to invest a lot of money in it and other cryptocurrencies based on the blockchain technology. However, nobody can guarantee for profit or loss of the users money.

Bitcoin is virtual, it is much alike with credit cards and online banking networks that people use on daily basis. The usage of bitcoin is really simple. Bitcoin can be used as an online payment method or in physical stores just like any other form of money. The storage of all bitcoin balances is taking place in a large distributed network and it is not possible for anyone to fraudulently amend them. Bitcoin users have exclusive control over their funds and there is no way that bitcoins will vanish just because they are virtual.

In case a user loses his wallet, the bitcoins-money become inactive. Bitcoins that got lost, will still remain in the blockchain. However, lost bitcoins cannot be used again because there is no way to retrieve the private keys that would allow them to be spent again. The value of bitcoin depends on the supply and demand of bitcoin, so when fewer bitcoins are available, the ones that are left will be in higher demand and increase in value.

In most jurisdictions bitcoin has not been made illegal by legislation. However, cryptocurrencies are severely restricted or banned in some jurisdictions such as Argentina and Russia. There may be also some limitations about the licensing of certain entities such as bitcoin exchanges in some jurisdictions such as Thailand for example.

Bitcoin is created in a way that gives the ability to its users to send and receive payments with an acceptable level of privacy. However, bitcoin cannot offer the same level of privacy as cash because of the fact that bitcoin isn’t anomymous. Extensive public records are being stored with every use of bitcoin. All personal information of the users are protected by various mechanisms and there are more in development. However, there is much to be done until these features have the right usage by most bitcoin users.

Bitcoin is undoubtedly a subject to similar regulations that are already in use inside existing financial systems. Bitcoin is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted, simply just because bitcoin cannot be more anonymous than cash. As a matter of fact, a large range of financial crimes is prevented just because of the way bitcoin is designed. Therefore, the use of bitcoin in some sort of illegal activity is hard to do, but without saying that it’s impossible to be done. Bitcoin is money and money has always been used both for legal and illegal purposes. However, bitcoin is considered to be safer than cash, credit cards and current banking systems due to the fact that they widely surpass bitcoin in terms of their finance crime. The design of bitcoin may be a huge step forward in making money more secure and could also take action as a significant protection against many forms of financial crime. For example, there is no possible way for someone to counterfeit bitcoins. Users have the full control of their payments and unapproved charges such as with the credit card fraud cannot be received. Transactions using bitcoin are irreversible and immune to fraudulent chargebacks. Through the blockchain technology, bitcoin is using very strong and useful mechanisms such as backups, encryption and multiple signatures, in order to make the money more secured against theft and loss.

There is no jurisdiction that considers bitcoin as a fiat currency with legal tender status, however often tax liability accrues regardless of the medium use. Many different jurisdictions have a wide variety of legistation which could cause income, sales, payroll, capital gains or some other form of tax liability to arise with bitcoin.

21 million bitcoins will be ever created, that makes bitcoin unique. However, this does not put any kind of limitation because transactions can be denominated in smaller sub-units of a bitcoin. Bitcoins can be divided up to 8 decimal places and it may even have the potential to divide in even smaller decimal places, if that is ever required in the future as the average transaction size decreases.

Bitcoins are useful as a form of money, that’s the reason they have value. Bitcoin acquires all the characteristics of money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility and recognizability) and it is based on the properties of mathematics and it is not relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like flat currencies). To sum up, bitcoin is backed by mathematics. The value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, value directly and only from people who are willing to accept them as a payment method.

The factors that determines the price of a bitcoin is supply and demand. Whenever the bitcoin demand is rising, the price is getting higher and when it scales back, so does the price.

The creation of new bitcoins is a very competitive and decentralized process called “mining”. Though this process individuals are rewarded by the network for their services. Bitcoin miners are collecting new bitcoins by processing transactions and securing the network, using specialized hardware.

The design of the bitcoin protocol is made in such a way that new bitcoins are created at a fixed rate. The creation of bitcoins is done at a decreasing and predictable rate, until there is a total amount of 21 million bitcoins, that means until the end of bitcoin’s issuance. The number of new bitcoins that are created each year is automatically halved overtime until bitcoin issuance halts completely.

Historically there are many currencies that have failed and are no longer been used. These currency failures were due to the hyperinflation of a kind. That is impossible to happen with bitcoin, since bitcoin has a creation limit. However, we don’t deny the possibility of some technical failures, competing currencies or political issues. Bitcoin has proven reliable for years since its inception but still that doesn’t mean that bitcoin should be considered absolutely safe from failures or hard times.

Bitcoin isn’t stable. In order to make bitcoin’s price stable, economy needs to developed at a large scale, with more businesses and users. Then the users will seek for price stability and a large scale economy may be developed. The main benefits of bitcoin as a payment system are to transfer money from point A to poin B and volatility does not affect this in any way. Businesses have the ability to convert bitcoin payment to their local currency instantly. This way they profit from the advantages of bitcoin without being subjected to price fluctuations. Bitcoin offers a lot of useful and unique features and so more and more people choose to use it. This way its possible for bitcoin to grow and evolve at a point where volatility in price will be limited.

It is totally possible for something like that to happen. At the moment, bitcoin is still the most popular decentralized virtual currency but there is no guarantee that it will remain in that position. There are already many alternative currencies that are inspired by bitcoin. However its really hard for a new currency to overtake bitcoin since it requires significant improvements in order to accomplish it. In case there will be some significant improvement on another currency, bitcoin can adapt those improvements and make it even harder or maybe impossible for some other currencies to overcome bitcoin.

Bitcoin payments are almost instant. However, there is a ten minutes delay on average before the first confirmation. This usual delay is taking place, because the network must include your payment in a block before you can spend the bitcoins you received and to confirm your transaction. With just one confirmation, you make sure that there is a general consent in the network and the bitcoins that have been sent are your property and they are not sent to anyone else. After your transaction has been included in a block, it will continue to be buried under every single block after it, this way, the risk of a reversed transaction is decreased. Six confirmations are considered to be a safe limit for a transaction but its up to each user to define at which point he thinks, a transaction is confirmed, so the user must set how many confirmation he wants.

The users of bitcoin can contain in their transactions, fee of their own choice in order to have priority in the processing. This way, their network confirmations are significantly faster. The exact way that fees work is still under development and there will be some changes in the future. The fee is not related to the amount of bitcoins being sent, so it may be unfairly high or extremely low. The data and the regularity of a transaction are the factors that define the fee. For example, if you make a lot of small transactions then the fee will be higher since there will be fee for every single transaction. On the other hand if there is only one transaction, the fee is lower. The transaction fee may be influenced from other factors too, such as the huge queue of network transactions. Therefore the biggest bitcoin companies in the world such as Blockchain have learnt to set the transaction fee automatically (dynamically) in order to adapt properly.

In case you receive bitcoin while your computer is powered off, the bitcoins will appear the next time you start your wallet application. Bitcoins are actually received and are appended to a public ledger that is shared between all devices on the network and not by the software on your computer. This way you don’t need to have your computer powered on all the time. Basically, if bitcoins are sent when the wallet application is not running, then it will download blocks and catch up any transactions it did not already know about, as soon as you open your wallet application. The bitcoins will eventually appear as if they were just received in real time.

Synchronization is the process of downloading and verifying all the previous bitcoin transactions in the network. For the calculation of the available balance on their bitcoin wallet and for new transactions, the users, should be aware of all the previous transactions that have taken place in the past.

The network fees we set for each transaction are dynamic - according to the network needs in order to get confirmation within a day. Here is the estimation of the current fees (stats change all the time): https://estimatefee.com/
If you want you can also accelerate your transaction on your own by using any acceleration services (you can find many services online). We cannot guarantee the time of confirmation with bitcoin transactions - everything depends entirely on the bitcoin network. If you want quick confirmations (within minutes), you can buy Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash from our ATMs (hopefully soon we will have them for online purchase also).

Bitcoin network may be considered as the biggest distributed computing project in the world and the blockchain technology, it’s protocol and it’s encryption are significantly powerful, in terms of security. The only vulnerability of bitcoin is in user’s error. For example, if someone loses his private key of his wallet or it get stolen or even in a case someone accidentally delete his account. Fortunately there is a big variety of many different bitcoin wallets, which bitcoin users can use in order to have good level of security for their money, simply by putting high security level in their wallet options.