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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

Tip for people buying on Coinbase: you can avoid their fee entirely by using GDAX. Deposit the money into your USD wallet first (no cost), then transfer the money to GDAX (no cost), and place a limit order (no cost). You may need to babysit your limit order for a couple minutes but this trick saves you $15 for every $1000 you buy.

I think there is little reason not to do this unless 1) you value your time very highly or 2) you can't be bothered. I honestly think most of Coinbase's revenue comes from people in the latter group.

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I've had a Coinbase account for years, and am verified. For some reason, I need extra verification for GDAX. When I try to do this, it always fails, with no explanation given except to try again later. So as much as I like Coinbase, and would like to use GDAX, it seems they haven't been able to handle the scaling load. It's frustrating.

The GDAX verification only worked for me on my phone. It required the browser to be able to access a camera.

It blows my mind that the behind-the-scenes exchange for Coinbase would be designed mobile-first/mobile-exclusive like that. I understand the mobile-first push in a lot of places, but somehow I kinda thought this was a niche that it wouldn't be as good of a fit for. (I can't wait until sites for downloading desktop software are mobile-first.) Works on desktop since I'm verified at least.

In order for your limit order to actually get filled if you do this, someone has to place a taker order that matches against yours and pay the GDAX fee on that. Coinbase still take their cut no matter what, all you're doing is making sure it comes out of the other side of the trade. If there aren't any less patient people willing to pay the trading fee, your order will just hang around until either someone does or you lose patience and pay it yourself.

Also, there's a risk that the price will move away from where you placed your order and it'll never fill, in which case you'd have to cancel it and re-submit the order at a worse price.

but if you look at coinbase and gdax's fee schedule, coinbase is as expensive, if not more than gdax. (0.25%-1% spread vs 0%-0.25% fee depending on whether you're taker/maker). unless you're in a period of insane volatility, the spreads are small enough that placing a limit order for highest bid + 0.01 or lowest ask - 0.01 would get you a trade within seconds.

https://www.gdax.com/fees/BTC-USD

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/210...

what if its also a limit sell order

Yup. Anyone mining on Nicehash has that loophole too now. Transfer BTC to Coinbase off-chain for free, then do the GDAX loop. Aren't market orders free, though? Don't need to babysit a limit order if you do and you get the spot price. Last time I checked it was, anyway.

You can get USD out of GDAX for free too using this. Well, "free." You pay the bid/ask spread for the liquidity, which is usually very small, especially on BTC.

As for other strategies, use LTC to get into your account cheaply if Segwit isn't online, then sell the LTCBTC pair and repeat the above.

No, market orders aren't free.

I couldn't find any documentation on the fees, and when I logged into GDAX and opened up a market order I saw no fees attached. Is that true? Is there a link? Can't seem to find anything on market order fees.

Here are some sources. GDAX charges 0.3% fees for BTC/USD market orders and 0.25% fees for ETH/USD market orders [0]. They charge slightly less if you trade large volumes (millions of $) which most users will not hit. GDAX's pricing structure incentives users to place stop/limit orders which help provide liquidity.

For purchases through coinbase, in the US they charge 1.49% in fees for cash/bank account purchases [1]. They have different pricing fees for other countries.

[0] https://www.gdax.com/fees/BTC-USD

[1] https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/210...

Cool, thanks. Couldn't find anything on their nightmare of a FAQ. Good to know.

I do this for manual buys when I'm doing large purchases/sells. However something I am willing to pay this .25-1% fee on is monthly automated purchases of cryptos for speculative holding.

You still loose some money entering and exiting a currency. The price you can buy is more than the price you can sell at any given time.

The spread is usually a penny at any given time, though. Have you even watched the order books? You also have the option of exiting with a limit order rather than a market order to save yourself a fee.

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