Exactly one year ago, Ruben Waterman signed the deed of incorporation for BITTR B.V. and got started with bittr. And what a year it was! What started as a “simple” idea - how can people save bitcoin as easily as possible - turned out to be a more difficult task than expected, but that certainly didn’t spoil the fun. Already in 2013, I became interested in bitcoin and after years of following bitcoin from the sidelines, I wanted to turn my hobby into my work in 2018, and so it happened. I would like to thank all our customers for their confidence in bittr and look forward to bittr’s second birthday with much excitement! In this post, I’d like to outline the ideas that moved me to start bittr.

Transparency

One of the most important aspects of Bitcoin for me is the transparency that the bitcoin blockchain offers. Every transaction that has ever occurred since the very existence of bitcoin (January 3, 2009) on the bitcoin network can be viewed, and the origin and path of every bitcoin can therefore be traced. Compare that to the current financial system… On the way to a more transparent financial system in the future, I’d like to pay my fair contribution. That’s why we made it as transparent as possible when you save bitcoin via bittr.

We have opted for a fixed fee of 1.5% per deposit, and to explicitly state the exact fee in your transaction confirmation. Moreover, bittr has no subscription fees so you are not committed to anything and you can always start and stop saving whenever you want! Of course, we never share in your profit or loss. This allows you to see exactly for which exchange rate we have purchased your bitcoin, what bittr has earned from it, how much the bitcoin mining fee was, and how much you’ve put into your bitcoin piggybank. We have deliberately chosen this and do not “hide” our transaction costs in the exchange rate!

This is how our transparent transaction overviews look like. We send them out automatically after each deposit.

Not your keys, not your bitcoin!

In all fairness, bittr is certainly not the first platform where you can save bitcoin. Existing exchange platforms would encourage the customer to keep their saved bitcoin on the exchange. That highly contradicts the values of bitcoin because the whole idea of bitcoin is that you can be your own bank which brings us to the second reason we’ve started bittr. We always pay out your bitcoin directly to your wallet on every deposit and we never manage customers’ bitcoin.

You will always have complete control over your bitcoin and your bitcoin can never be stolen, should bittr ever be hacked (of course we do everything we can to ensure that a hack never happens but there are countless examples such as the MtGox hack, Bitstamp hack, and recently the Quadriga hack). Always ensure that you use a platform such as bittr that does not store bitcoin on your behalf! For extra security, we recommend that you use a Trezor or Ledger hardware wallet to ensure that your bitcoin piggybank is well secured.

Recurring SEPA transfers!

In addition to our two ideological considerations for starting bittr, the main objective of bittr was of course to make it as easy as possible to save bitcoin for everyone in the European Union! The uniform SEPA payment network is extremely suitable for this. Every European consumer with an IBAN account can sign up for bittr and immediately start their bitcoin savings plan.

For your initial registration, you will need your email address, mobile phone number, and bitcoin address, after which you will receive a personal “Payment Reference” and bittr’s bank details. With this information, you set up your periodic transfer via the e-banking platform of your own bank. In less than five minutes everyone can start saving bitcoin!

Setting up a Bitcoin savings plan is easy! After signing up on our website, you can set up a recurring SEPA transfer from within your own online banking environment.

In short, the three reasons I started bittr one year ago:

• Further improve transparency in the Euro to Bitcoin conversion industry by being transparent about all costs involved and showing them to the customer.
• Making sure that people actually own their own bitcoin, as opposed to trusting a third party, achieved through paying out deposits directly to the customer’s bitcoin wallet.
• Promote responsible investment in bitcoin through a recurring investment (also known as dollar-cost-averaging), as opposed to having investors do large “one-off investments”, through simple recurring SEPA transfers.

Once again, thank you very much for making this exciting journey possible and being amongst the very first customers of bittr, thank you! I’m looking forward to bittr’s second anniversary with each and everyone of you!

Happy Savings!
Ruben

Do you have any questions? Reach out to us at hello@getbittr.com.