I’ve covered how to sell Bitcoin cheaply on Coinbase. Next we need to know how to transfer the cash into our own bank account. The process is to select British Pound on the My assets page in the Coinbase interface, then select the Cash out all button:
Cash out all (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
then Continue:
Cash out – Continue (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
At this point you can cash out to the debit card you originally used to buy Bitcoin, or select Add a debit card, but the fees on debit cards are high (£52.68 in this case) so we choose Add a bank account instead. Note that, as it says, we need to make a deposit into Coinbase from that bank account to link the two accounts together so we can then move our money in the opposite direction.
Now I believe there are two ways to do this. Firstly, you can select Add a bank account, then UK bank account:
Add a bank account (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
There’s a scam warning (hit Continue) then we get the details we need to make a deposit to Coinbase:
Add cash bank details (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
However, that seemed to me a rather manual and awkward approach so I backed out. Instead, I used a different method, but it does require you to have a banking app on your phone. This way we will link the bank account to the Coinbase account before trying to withdraw the account balance.
Go to the Settings menu under your user profile (here the ‘L’ button top right), then select Payment methods, then Add a payment method. This gives the option of an Easy bank transfer, which wasn’t available through the first route:
Add a payment method (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
Select Easy bank transfer. There’s a scam warning (hit Continue), then enter a nominal amount to transfer from your bank account to Coinbase (e.g. £10) and select your bank by name:
Easy bank transfer (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
Select Continue. Then there’s some information given about the transfer, select Continue again. This creates a QR code page – follow the instructions: scan it, follow the link, authorise payment on your banking app, then return back to the page. Note you have around 7-8 minutes to complete the process before it times out:
Complete payment QR code (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
At that point there is a deposit pending message:
Deposit pending (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
In practice the deposit goes through quickly; it showed up on the My assets->British Pound page as soon as I clicked on the View account button:
British Pound page (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
The next time I clicked the Cash out all button and Continue there was a new option under Select a destination (for me it was the next day, so I don’t know how long it took to become available), and that was the bank account I had sent the £10 from as planned. Also, it was listed as Free:
Cash out to bank (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
Selecting that option, then Continue produces a Cash out preview:
Cash out preview (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
Clicking on Cash out now causes a text code to be sent to your phone:
Cash out code (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
On entering the code we get a confirmation of the cash out request:
Cash out request (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
On selecting Done the money was instantly gone from the Coinbase account:
Updated account (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
I immediately checked my bank account. There wasn’t a deposit showing, but the balance had increased indicating a pending deposit. When I checked the account the next morning, the money was in.
So that’s the process of withdrawing cash back out to your bank account. Although the first time is fiddly because of having to link your bank account, once that’s done it’s straightforward for all future cash outs.
I have taken you through the process of opening a Coinbase account, and buying your first Bitcoin. Although buying and selling on Coinbase is relatively easy, the downside of that convenience is the high level of Coinbase fees. £100 bought 0.00185495 of Bitcoin in that latter article, worth about £96 at the time, so effectively 4% was lost in fees.
However, there is a way of buying and selling on Coinbase with much lower fees, and that is to use the Coinbase trading platform. Having been doing this for years I knew it originally as GDAX, which was an exchange bought up by Coinbase, then it was renamed to Coinbase Pro, and in its latest version it is known as Coinbase Advanced. More details are here.
Anyway, the point is if you learn to use Coinbase Advanced you can buy and sell Bitcoin and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies at very low fees. I’ll now go through the process.
First of all, I’ll assume you have some Bitcoin available to sell. To demonstrate the process I transferred in 0.05 BTC from outside Coinbase which, along with the 0.00185495 mentioned above meant a total of 0.05185495 showing on the My assets page; there we click on the Advanced button bottom left:
Selecting Advanced trading on Coinbase (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
Click the various tip messages until you’re in the interface proper:
Coinbase Advanced trading interface – Dark mode (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
By default it has a dark theme, i.e. a black background, designed to be easy on the eye for those who trade all the time. It also has the advantage of showing clearly if you are in Coinbase’s standard view or the trading view. Having said that, the colour scheme is optional – to change it just go to your profile menu (shown here as ‘L’) and switch Dark mode to Light.
There are many elements in the trading view, too many to go into detail here. For now the things to note are the currently selected coin pair (BTC-USDC, i.e. buy/sell Bitcoin with USDC coin) shown top left. Under that is the current price chart (where ‘1m’ indicates 1 minute intervals as candlesticks) and below that any recent orders you’ve put in – here blank. To the right is a list of orders other people have put in, and the trades they have made recently. To the far right is the interesting bit – the panel where you buy and sell.
To begin, select the BTC-USDC button top left and swap from buying/selling BTC in USDC coin to BTC-GBP, i.e. buy and sell in Great British Pounds. Up will come a search box – enter BTC-GBP:
Selecting the BTC-GBP pair (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
Then click on the BTC-GBP option and the price chart will change to Bitcoin – GB pounds (then close the Markets window):
Now lets sell some Bitcoin into pounds. In the right hand window (‘Available to trade’) select the Sell tab. Here we can see I have the 0.05185495 Bitcoin available to sell, and I don’t yet have any GBP in my account. For details of the selling options available see here; however for our purposes the main two are Limit and Market. Market is straightforward, you sell your Bitcoin at the current market price. This is essentially the same as selling it in your main Coinbase account, but by doing it here in the Advanced trading view you will pay much lower fees.
The Limit option is more interesting, and the one I nearly always use. It allows you to set the price at which you want to sell your Bitcoin, rather than accepting the market rate. As I write this on a Saturday evening the Bitcoin price has just dropped below £53k. I don’t want to sell below £53k so I’m going to set my sell price at £53k. The good news is that if the price rises through £53k overnight as I’m hopeful it will then I get to sell at my preferred price. The downside is that the price may continue to fall and my order will never be filled. So, if I need the money fast, or I think it’s going to keep falling, I should actually sell at the Market rate – but I’m optimistic it will go up and I’m happy to wait a few days to get the price I want.
Here’s the process: click Limit if it’s not selected. Enter the Limit Price (for me, 53000). I want to sell 0.05 Bitcoin so in the Amount box I enter 0.05. I leave everything else as default:
Trading tab (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
then I click the Sell BTC button. I immediately get an acknowledgement, and my order is now showing in the Orders pane:
Order submitted (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
It is marked as Open as it has not yet been filled (because the market price is below what I asked for). Now we wait…
It is now 2 days since I wrote the previous paragraph. Bitcoin did not go up to £53k that night as I had hoped, but it did during the following night/early this morning and my order was filled. In fact the Bitcoin price even went up to £54k this afternoon; however it has since dropped to £52k so I’m happy to have achieved my automatic sell at £53k.
In the interface we can see that the order Status has changed from Open to Filled, and the Total shows how much I sold the 0.05 BTC for – £2634.10:
Order filled (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
Clicking on the ellipsis (three dots) for that order we can choose View details:
Order details (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
The order information includes the cost of Fees, which we can see was £15.90 on a sale Total of £2,634.10 – so about 0.6%. That’s what this is all about – remember the fee on a standard sale on the main Coinbase site was around 4%, so this method is massively cheaper.
In fact 0.6% is about the highest fee you can pay this way – if you hold significant amounts of cryptocurrency on your account and/or you do large amounts of trading the fees can be much lower. Full details are here.
For now we’re done here. At the bottom left of the screen click Advanced to off, and we’re back in the standard Coinbase view. Selecting My assets shows that we now have £2634.10 as the balance for British Pounds, and our Bitcoin balance has gone back to 0.00185495 (the amount we bought for £100 in the previous article before we transferred in the new 0.05 BTC).
New asset balances (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)
So that’s the process of selling or buying Bitcoin with very low fees.
