Whether you’re a new user or a seasoned trader you will find answers to all of your questions on this page. If you're new to Bitcoins you can find out how to buy Bitcoins using LocalBitcoins from this handy guide . If you want to become a trader the selling Bitcoins online guide is for you. You can also open up a support ticket to contact our support.

Next to usernames on the front page and on user's public profile you can find a small green, yellow or grey dot. This dot shows how quickly the trader will usually reply to trades.The response time is calculated from the median reply time of all trade of a user from the past 30 days.

You can buy Bitcoins without having a mobile phone, but you will be limited to which advertisements you can reply to. By verifying your phone number with LocalBitcoins increases the number of advertisements that you can contact.

If all goes well Bitcoin transactions sent with the correct fee take between 10-60 minutes when you are sending Bitcoins to your LocalBitcoins Wallet. If your transaction is taking longer than this, please check that the fee is correct.Transactions between LocalBitcoins users are instantaneous.Transactions you send from your LocalBitcoins wallet are sent with a high priority fee to ensure they confirm within approximately 30 minutes (within the next three blocks).Your Bitcoin transaction was most likely sent with a fee that's too low or the Bitcoin network might be experiencing congestion, in this case transactions will take much longer to go through.Bitcoin transactions have to be confirmed by the Bitcoin network before they are usable from the wallet they are sent to. You can read more about confirmations on the Bitcoin wikipedia

In order to sell Bitcoins on LocalBitcoins.com you'll first need to send some Bitcoins to your LocalBitcoins Wallet. To do that you'll need a LocalBitcoins.com account, access to Bitcoins in another Bitcoin wallet and you need to know your LocalBitcoins.com receiving address.To find your LocalBitcoins.com receiving address you need to go to visit the Wallet page and click the Receive Bitcoins button.At the top of the page you'll find your receiving address.We do this to protect your privacy. Your old receiving addresses will eventually expire. The expiring time for receiving addresses is 12 months.Once you have your LocalBitcoins.com receiving address, you can go to your other Bitcoin wallet and use this address to send Bitcoins to your LocalBitcoins.com address.that the minimum you can send to your LocalBitcoins wallet is deposit fee. Bitcoin deposits smaller than that are not processed and cannot be recovered as they are used to pay the fee.

If you purchase Bitcoins using LocalBitcoins.com, the Bitcoins will appear in your LocalBitcoins Wallet. From there you can easily send the Bitcoins to other Bitcoin addresses. The vast majority Bitcoin services are compatible with each other, the same Bitcoins you buy from LocalBitcoins will work in your favorite online stores that accept Bitcoin, and also in local shops that accept Bitcoin.To send Bitcoins from your LocalBitcoins Wallet enter the receiving address and the amount you wish to send and clickOn the following page review the details, and enter your password (and your two-factor authentication code, if you have 2FA enabled) to send the transaction.that your LocalBitcoins Wallet cannot be used in a few specific situations. For example, you cannot use it with sites like satoshidice thatAlso newly generated Bitcoins from mining cannot be sent to your LocalBitcoins Wallet.

One of the best features of Bitcoin is that it gives you control over your money, but it's also this feature that makes it very different from traditional money. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, most traditional payment methods can be charged back. This creates risk for the person selling the Bitcoins, as PayPal or a bank can take the money someone paid him out of his account after he has sent away the Bitcoins. That is why traders need to have a high price for certain payment methods, to protect themselves against this risk. That is why we recommend for you to get the best price to pay using a hard to reverse payment method , such as Cash Deposit, bank transfers and mobile payments (Like Qiwi in Russia). When you search to buy Bitcoins, select All online offers as a payment method and you will see offers for all payment methods and you can choose one that is convenient for you and offers a better price. What happens when I pay, and the seller doesn't give me my Bitcoins? All our online trades are protected with escrow to prevent this from happening. When the trade is started, the Bitcoin amount for the trade is taken from the sellers wallet and is held by LocalBitcoins for the entire time of the trade. If the seller is trying to scam you, it's easy for you to open a dispute on the trade and our support staff will contact you to ask for proof that you have paid and then give the Bitcoins to you.

Absolutely! In each advertisement you see what's called limits. That shows you the least and the most amount of Bitcoins that you can buy from that advertisement. One Bitcoin can be divided into much much smaller pieces, the smallest piece is called one satoshi and is the same as 0.00000001 BTC.

Next to each advertisement on the website the price of a Bitcoin for that advertisement is shown as currency per Bitcoin. For example, if we are buying Bitcoin with the currency US dollars the price would be shown as 10420 USD / BTC. This means that if I wanted to buy 1 Bitcoin it would cost me 10420 US dollars.

All online trades are protected by escrow. When a trade is started the amount of Bitcoins for the trade is automatically reserved from the seller's LocalBitcoins Wallet. This means that if the seller runs away with your money and does not release your Bitcoins LocalBitcoins.com support can release the Bitcoins to you from escrow. If you're selling Bitcoins, never release the escrow before you know that you have received money from the Bitcoin buyer.

To help you get started with your first Bitcoin trade we've made two short guides to answer all your questions.If you are looking toplease take a look at our how to buy Bitcoins guide If you are looking toplease take a look at our how to sell Bitcoins guide

LocalBitcoins is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange. We are a marketplace where users can buy and sell Bitcoins to and from each other. Users, called traders, create advertisements with the price and the payment method they want to offer. You can browse our website for trade advertisements and search for a payment method you prefer. You will find traders buying and selling Bitcoins online for more than 60 different payment methods.If you're new to LocalBitcoins and want to buy Bitcoins, please take a look at our how to buy guide to learn how to buy Bitcoins.

You can store your Bitcoins in the LocalBitcoins Wallet, but we try to promote other Bitcoin wallets. The best way is to store your Bitcoins in a wallet on your computer or mobile phone, as that gives you complete control over your Bitcoins. Our favourite standalone Bitcoin wallet is Electrum . Paper wallets are a good idea if you want to store Bitcoin securely. Wallets on your smartphone can also be a convenient way of carrying Bitcoins around with you wherever you are.You can read more in our related blogpost

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, it is not backed by any single country or bank and is usable anywhere in the world by anyone with a computer or smartphone and access to the Internet. To read up more on what Bitcoin is you can take a look at these websites.

Users who are found breaking the rules will have their posts removed and may have their LocalBitcoins.com account banned either for a time period or indefinitely.

Login Guard protects your account from logins when someone else knows your username and password. Whenever someone logs in to your account from a new computer or a new web browser an email is sent to address used to register your LocalBitcoins account. This email contains some information on who started the login and a link. You need to click the link to verify your login.You can take a look at all the browsers that are authorized by Login Guard to login to your account from the Authorized Browsers page in the security options. This page lets you revoke access from a browser if you do not recognize it, e.g. because the location is not yours.If you have trouble getting access to your account using Login Guard you can open up a support ticket to get help.

Sometimes you want to take a look at your login history, you can find in the security options a page called Login History. It shows you a list of each login to your account.

Web notifications allow you to receive pop-up notifications through your browser whenever you get a new notification on LocalBitcoins. If you're trading Bitcoins and want to know immediately when something happens, enable web notifications from your profile Tick the box that saysand when your browser asks you for permission to show web notifications, press accept. You're now all set and will start receiving web notifications.

Currently we do not allow username changes due to security reasons.

When you visit a user’s profile there is a large button that you can use to mark the user trusted. Trusted users can view trade advertisements that you have created and set to viewable only for trusted users. Traders can use this functionality e.g in order to create ads with better prices for their regular customers and reward repeat business.

Yes, you can change the feedback you've given someone else. To do so, visit their public profile and scroll down to the feedback section and click thebutton. You can't change feedback that someone else has given you, however, if you believe the feedback has mistakes you can contact your old trading partners through Closed contacts in your Dashboard and ask them to change their feedback.LocalBitcoins.com never edits or removes feedback left by users. The only exception is feedback containing abusive, racist language, threats or exposes personal information.

Feedback that has been given can be either confirmed or unconfirmed. Confirmed feedback is shown on a user's public profile and affects the user's feedback score. Unconfirmed feedback is only visible to the receiving user and LocalBitcoins.com administrators. For an unconfirmed feedback to become confirmed, one of the following conditions must be met:

LocalBitcoins.com uses a feedback system that shows a score on your public profile. This score, a percentage, shows how much positive feedback a user has. You can only give one feedback to a user. The feedback can be one of four types: Trustworthy, Positive, Neutral, Block and Block without feedback. Once given, feedback will be visible on a user's public profile if certain conditions are met, otherwise the feedback remains unconfirmed. Unconfirmed feedback is only visible for the receiving user and to LocalBitcoins administrators and does not affect the feedback score. Users that have never traded can’t leave feedback, however if they mark each other as trusted or not trusted they are able to leave trustworthy, neutral or block feedback. Explanation of feedback types Trustworthy Giving trustworthy feedback increases the receiver's feedback score while at the same time marks the receiver as a trusted person. People who you mark as trusted can view your Trusted Only advertisements. You can find a list of people whom you've marked as trusted under your profile. Positive Giving positive feedback increases the receiver's feedback score. Neutral Giving neutral feedback doesn't affect the receiver's feedback score. Block By blocking a user he can no longer contact you, and he receives negative feedback from you which lowers his feedback score. Block without feedback This option blocks the user from contacting you, but his feedback score remains unaffected.

Two-factor authentication is enabled from the security settings page . We offer two different types of two-factor authentication,and. We recommend you use mobile based two-factor authentication and only use paper based if you do not have access to a smartphone.If you lose access to your two-factor codes you will not be able to log in to your account and it will require a two-factor reset which takes two weeks to process.Once you've used up all your 90 codes from the paper based code table two-factor authentication will be automatically disabled from your account and you will need to activate two-factor authentication again.

You can read our Security Guide which explains on how you can secure your account. Here are a few tips that will protect you against the majority of phishing and hacking attempts.You can enable all of these security features under Security from your profile.With Bitcoins, the owner of the wallet and the Bitcoins is responsible for his/her own security. If your user account is compromised you will lose your Bitcoins, and because Bitcoin transactions arereversible it is not possible for LocalBitcoins to help you get them back. That's why it's very important to follow the security tips given above.

Your phone number can only be verified with one account. To use your phone number with a different account you must first deactivate your phone number from the previous account. If you can't log in to your other account to remove your phone number please contact LocalBitcoins.com support and include the phone number in the ticket.

If this did not work, or if you do not have the backup code written down, you cannot re-activate your two-factor authentication and must submit a two-factor authentication removal. You can find a link to submit it while logging in on the page that asks for your two-factor authentication code.

You can now use the code the app displays to authenticate your LocalBitcoins account and log in.

If you have just bought a new smartphone or otherwise need to re-activate your Mobile based two-factor authentication application you can follow these steps.To re-activate your Two-Factor authentication codes with Google Authenticator you will need the backup code that you wrote down during the activation process.

In case you have have forgotten your username, email and password which you have used with LocalBitcoins, visit the support request page and select the option that fits your situation the most and fill out the form and we can help you restore access to your account.

You can use your email address instead of your username when you login. Just type it in the username field. If you’ve forgotten both you can open up a support ticket and we can help you with regaining access to your account.

The LocalBitcoins website is currently available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Chinese. You can change the language of the site from the footer, scroll down all the way to the bottom of the page and click the text next to the globe under the heading Services to see a dropdown of the languages on offer.

Below all the listings on the front page you can find a locations search field, type in your location into the field (city, country) and press enter. After the page reloads you will see ad listings for your location.

If you're not receiving emails from LocalBitcoins, there are a few things that you can do.

Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, once you’ve sent money to another Bitcoin address it is not possible for you or LocalBitcoins.com to reverse it. To get your Bitcoin back you can try to find the owner of the address and ask them to return the Bitcoin to you. From where did you get the address where you sent the Bitcoins to? You can try googling the address to see if is related to any Bitcoin service that has contact details or you can try using a service such as wallet explorer to see if the wallet is tagged as belonging to a Bitcoin company.Please note that the same wallet can have multiple incoming addresses. The Bitcoin protocol ensures that Bitcoins are not sent to an address that does not exist, but they can be sent to addresses which are inactive or not controlled by anyone.

LocalBitcoins Wallet is a web wallet. Sending and receiving transactions are not connected to each other. If you are looking at your LocalBitcoins.com Bitcoin address on Tradeblock.com or from any other block explorer you will see transactions that don't belong to you.This is how web wallets operate. You cannot make connections with incoming and outgoing transactions for the same Bitcoin address.

This answer concerns the case when you areAfter you send in a trade request to the seller of Bitcoins, you have a time window to complete the payment before the trade is automatically canceled (the payment window varies depending on the payment method of the trade). During this time you need to complete your payment and press the I have paid button. The seller is notified that you've made the payment and the Bitcoins will be held in escrow until the seller releases them for you when seeing the payment in his/her account.If you paid for the purchase, but did not mark the payment complete before the payment time window expired, please contact the seller through the trade. The Bitcoin seller has functionality to Reopen the purchase, this also re-enables escrow. You can contact the seller and your other existing trade contacts from the Dashboard in your LocalBitcoins User Profile. Send a message to the seller and kindly explain the situation and why you couldn't complete payment within the time window.If the seller does not respond to this request please contact LocalBitcoins.com support using the Support request form and mention your trade contact id number.

We reserve a small amount of Bitcoin from your wallet balance to pay the Bitcoin transaction fee to the Bitcoin network. Each Bitcoin transaction has to pay a small fee to the network to be confirmed no matter from where it's sent. We reserve this fee in advance to prevent your wallet balance from becoming negative. You can find a list of all of our fees on our fees page .

The sellers usually release Bitcoins as soon as they see your payment, which can sometimes take an hour or two. If you've paid but are still waiting there is nothing to worry about, for all online trades are protected by escrow and the seller cannot run away with your Bitcoin. If there are any issues with a trade and the seller won't release your Bitcoins, you can dispute the trade to have LocalBitcoins support resolve it. If you are buying or selling Bitcoins online, you can dispute the trade after 1 hour if you have marked the payment completed. A dispute can no longer be started if the Bitcoins have been released from escrow. When a trade you're involved in becomes disputed, you'll receive an SMS notification and an email, in most cases simply starting the dispute is enough to get the attention of your trading partner. A disputed trade is usually resolved within 24-48 hours.

Sometimes a trader may ask for your ID. If you are trading for the first time with a trader he/she may ask for you to identify yourself, even if you've already verified your ID with LocalBitcoins. This is because in certain countries sellers are required by local laws to know who their customers are. Most sellers explain in the terms of the trade if they require ID verification or not. If you do not wish to give the seller your ID, you can always cancel the trade and search for a trader with less strict requirements. Always send your ID to the seller via the trade chat, our trade chat messages are kept encrypted on our servers. All photographs sent to the trade chat is also marked with a watermark to prevent misuse of the images.

Make sure that your transaction is in accordance with our Terms of Service and try sending it to a different wallet address.

To verify your company you will need to fulfil following requirements:

Once that is completed you will gain access to the company verification process, a link will appear on the ID verification page that will allow you to upload your verification documents.

To verify your company with your LocalBitcoins account you will first need to verify your own ID through the normal ID verification process .

You can verify your company with LocalBitcoins, this displays your companies name to your trading partner on the trade page in addition to your own real name.

If you want to show in trades to other users that you've verified the ID of a LocalBitcoins user head over to your profile and tick the box "Show me as real name verifier to others". Whenever a user whom you have verified his real name opens up a trade with another trader it will show in the security box that you have verified the user's real name. This is a handy way to increase the trust of users. This option is enabled by default for new accounts.

Some advertisements are marked as Trusted only. These advertisements are only available for accounts that you have marked as trusted in LocalBitcoins. How can I mark someone as trusted? To add people to your trusted list, you can invite your friends by email, visit their public LocalBitcoins User Profile or give trustworthy feedback after finishing a trade with them. You can find a list of people you trust under your profile. Creating special deals for trusted people To create a trusted only advertisement, check the option on the advertisement edit form. The seller of Bitcoins decides trust. For a sell advertisement, only people who you have marked as trusted can access it. For a buying advertisement, only people who trust you can access it.

You can see pricing how-to to use more complex formulas. If you have javascript enabled, you can use weighted (USD24) or market price (bitstamp) as a base price, and enter your commission percentage to "commission" field. You can use negative commission percentage too, if you want to sell below market price (or pay extra).

The green thumb is assigned automatically to your advertisements based on an algorithm. We don't want to share exactly what is required but the following things are looked at. Once your advertisement fulfils all the requirements, it will receive the green thumb.

When your account matches all the above requirements you will automatically receive the pro trader badge. You can click here to view your current trade statistics. Your account registration date and feedback can be viewed from your public profile page.

Becoming a pro trader is designation all traders strive for as it's a badge that only few can get. To be assigned the pro trader badge you need to have fulfilled all of the following criteria:

Every user is limited in how many advertisements he can create, when you start out you can create in total 5 advertisements. If you want to create more, you need more trade volume.

You can always open up a support ticket to ask for help with advertisement visibility.

Click the headings to run a check on your advertisement to see who can open a trade for the ad and who can see it. Any problems with your advertisement not being visible will be shown and explained here.

If you still can't find your ad there might be some problems with the settings on your advertisement. Visit the public page of the problematic advertisement and towards the bottom of the page you'll find a tool you can use to check for errors that might prevent it from being displayed.

When you search for advertisements the results show a maximum of 15 advertisements, if there are more advertisements that match the search criteria they can be found by clicking the Show more... link and selecting a payment method. When you gain more trade history, more feedback your advertisements will also be shown as part of the first 15.

Only 6 advertisements per category are shown on the front page and certain high risk payment methods are excluded. You need be an experienced trader with many trades under your belt before your ads will show up on the front page.

If you're running advertisements for online payment methods you must have at least 0.04 BTC in your wallet for your ads to show.

There are many things that affect advertisement visibility, e.g. your trading history; feedback; account age; advertisement settings and more. If your ad is not showing up please check the following list of common problems.

Most of your data is stored for 5 years after you've requested account deletion. If you've never used your account for trades or transactions, your data is deleted 14 days after you delete your account. Please see section 6 in the Privacy Policy for detailed information on data deletion and retention.

If you have not used your account for bitcoin transactions or trades we can delete your account immediately. If you have made transactions or started trades we store your data according to our privacy policy for a maximum of five years.

Most of the personal data that you have given to us can be corrected by yourself from the profile edit page. For data such as your full name or other data that you notice is wrong you can contact customer support and let us know which data you want to correct.

You can access the vast majority of personal data we store on your account from the following pages:If you could not find the data you were looking on the above pages please contact customer support to request a copy of the data that you are interested in.

In order to provide you with the best possible service we use services from third party companies. As part of these services it is necessary to share part of your personal data with them.

Address A Bitcoin address looks like a long string of random letters and numbers. Addresses are used when you want to send or receive Bitcoins. Each wallet has at least one receiving and one sending address. When you want to receive Bitcoins to your wallet you need to give the sender your receiving wallet address.

AML and KYC Anti Money Laundering and Know Your Customer is a group of laws in the United States that require Bitcoin sellers to know who their customers are. Certain sellers will ask for your identification to comply with these laws. Other countries around the world may have similar laws and requirements.

Bitcoin network fee Since the Bitcoin miners work to confirm your transactions, they won’t do this for free. Rather you pay a tiny amount of Bitcoin to them to help them continue to confirm. This is why each time you move Bitcoin, it costs a tiny bit.

Blockchain The Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoins. It’s what makes it work. Bitcoin transactions are sent to the blockchain so that miners can put them into the blocks that they mine. Once a block containing your transaction is mined it has been added to the blockchain and your transaction receives one confirmation.

Blockchain.info Not to be confused with the blockchain, blockchain.info is one of many websites that work as blockchain explorers. These websites allow you to ‘see’ the blockchain and what’s going on in it. In practical terms this lets you view your transactions and see if they are confirmed or not. You can also check to see how many unconfirmed transactions there are, the more the longer it will take for your transaction to become confirmed.

Bitcoin Block A Bitcoin block is one “link” in the blockchain. One block contains a group of Bitcoin transactions that have been confirmed. When Bitcoin miners ‘mine’ these blocks they calculate through computer algorithms which when put in the blockchain, confirms transactions. In turn miners receive transaction fees and newly created Bitcoins for confirming transactions.

BTC/Coin BTC is the acronym for Bitcoin. Coin, coins et. al. are also slang terms for Bitcoin.

Circle/Coinbase Two Bitcoin exchanges based in the U.S. that require you to verify your identity before being allowed to trade, along with other limitations.

Cold storage/Cold wallet This refers to a way of storing Bitcoins in a safe and secure way, offline. This is also how the vast majority of Bitcoins LocalBitcoins hold on to are stored.

Confirmation For a Bitcoin transaction to be completed it needs to be confirmed. Good habits are to wait for at least 3-6 confirmations before you can consider a transaction good. A confirmation happens when a transaction has been added to a block that Bitcoin miners successfully mine.

Exchange An exchange is a platform/service where users can change one type of currency for another.

Fiat Fiat comes from Latin and means “let it be done” or “it shall be”. It’s used as a term to mean all currencies that derive their value from governmental regulation or other central authorities.

Hot wallet The opposite of a cold wallet / cold storage. A hot wallet is located on a computer connected to the internet. At LocalBitcoins the hot wallet is where we store a small amount of Bitcoins at a time. It’s from here where your transactions are sent. We only keep a very small amount of Bitcoin here to protect ourselves from hackers.

LBC LBC is where you are, it’s the acronym for LocalBitcoins :)

Mining This is what Bitcoin Miners do in order to confirm transactions and add them to the blockchain. When a Bitcoin miner mines, he uses computers to do difficult calculations which answers are easily proven to be correct. This way, when a miner completes a calculation anyone can easily see that the miner has actually done work. This work can then be used to create a Bitcoin block. What miners get in return from mining is new Bitcoins and transaction fees.

Multisig Multisignature, often heard in combination with wallet. A multisignature wallet is one that has several cryptographic keys concerned with it. This way if you have two of three keys, say, you can move money out of it. But with only one you cannot do anything.

P2P Peer-to-Peer. It’s a form of network structure. Rather than having everything go via a centralized node, in a peer-to-peer structure everything goes from user to user. There’s no centralized part to rely on.

Satoshi A satoshi is the smallest amount of Bitcoin that can be sent, or 0.00000001 BTC.

Satoshi Nakamoto The pseudonym of the person who invented Bitcoin. No one knows who he is, but he does own quite a nice amount of BTC.

SEPA Single Euro Payment Area, SEPA transfers are a special kind of bank transfers within the EU.

Transaction A Bitcoin transaction, the actual act of moving Bitcoin from one wallet to another.

txid Transaction Id. This is a long string of numbers and letters that is the ID of a single transaction. It’s handy to know as you can paste this into a blockchain explorer and see what’s up with your transaction. It’s mainly used to see how many confirmations a transaction has.