Frequently asked questions about crypto

No. One bitcoin divides into 100 million units called satoshis, and every platform lets you buy fractions. You buy by amount, not by unit: put in 25 euros and you receive whatever number of satoshis that buys at the time. The same goes for ether and for almost every other cryptocurrency. The idea that you need a whole unit comes from mentally comparing crypto with shares, where for decades you did buy whole certificates. Here the price per unit tells you nothing about whether something is cheap or expensive: what matters is the total supply and how much of it you are buying.

Most platforms set minimums of somewhere between 1 and 10 euros or dollars per order, so the real barrier is something else: fees. Buying 10 euros' worth at a 1.5 per cent fee and paying the same again on the way out means starting 3 per cent down before the price moves at all. And if you then want to move the coins to your own wallet, the withdrawal fee can swallow a meaningful slice of a small balance. Start with an amount you could lose entirely without it changing your plans, and compare costs in how to choose a safe exchange.

Since MiCA took full effect, only firms holding a crypto-asset service provider licence from an EU national competent authority, or passporting one in from another member state, may serve customers in the Union. Several well-known platforms were authorised during 2025: Coinbase and Bitstamp in Luxembourg, Kraken in Ireland, Bybit and Bitpanda in Austria, OKX and Crypto.com in Malta. Binance, by contrast, withdrew its application and announced on 26 June 2026 that it would stop serving EU customers. Outside the EU the picture differs country by country. Either way, check your regulator's public register before opening an account.

In the EU and in most major jurisdictions, yes. Buying, holding, sending and selling crypto is legal for an individual. What is regulated is the activity of the businesses providing services: custody, exchange and order execution require a licence under MiCA. That is why some assets have vanished from European platforms without becoming illegal to hold: USDT was never authorised as an e-money token issuer and was delisted from regulated venues, yet keeping it in self-custody remains perfectly lawful. The full picture is in crypto regulation.

An exchange is a company where you buy and sell; a wallet is the software or device holding the keys you sign transactions with. Leave the coins on the exchange and the company holds the keys, so what you own is a bookkeeping claim against it. Move them to your own wallet and you sign, nobody can freeze or lose your funds, and equally nobody is there to appeal to when you make a mistake. It is the single most important distinction in the whole sector, and it is worked through in custodial vs non-custodial wallets.

It depends on the amount. A hardware device costs roughly 50 to 250 euros depending on the model, so for 50 euros' worth of crypto it makes little sense. For amounts that would genuinely hurt to lose, yes: it keeps the private key off an internet-connected computer and forces you to confirm every operation on its own screen. What it will not do is protect you from signing a malicious transaction you approved yourself. Before buying, look at the real differences between models in how to choose a hardware wallet, and always buy from the manufacturer, never second-hand.

Yes, and it happens daily. According to the Chainalysis report published on 8 January 2026, more than 3.4 billion dollars were stolen during 2025, of which 713 million came out of personal wallets across some 158,000 incidents affecting more than 80,000 distinct victims. Theft almost never involves breaking the cryptography: it is phishing, a deceptive signature request, a malicious browser extension or a seed phrase saved on a phone. The defence is boring and it works: self-custody with hardware, the seed on paper or metal and offline, and systematic suspicion of any site asking you to sign. See the most common crypto scams.

If you have lost the seed but still have access to the wallet, move the funds right now to a new wallet whose backup you do hold. If you have lost both the seed and access, the funds are gone: there is no support line, no password reset and no copy of your key anywhere else. That is precisely the trade-off of self-custody. This is why the backup goes on paper or metal, stays offline and, if the amount justifies it, exists in more than one physical location. Never a photo, never the cloud, never a password manager.

Yes. A public blockchain is an open, permanent record: anyone can see the balances, amounts and movements of an address. What does not appear is your name, which is why the right word is pseudonymity, not anonymity. The moment an address is linked to you, which happens as soon as you buy on a platform that runs identity checks, its entire history, past and future, is associated with you. Chain analysis firms and law enforcement work on exactly that. If privacy matters to you, do not reuse addresses and avoid mixing identified funds with funds you would rather not link.

Act fast and stop paying. First, cut it off: do not send another cent, however insistent the demand for a fee to unlock your withdrawal, and revoke any spending approvals you granted. Second, document everything: screenshots, addresses, transaction hashes, profiles and conversations. Third, report it to the police or the cybercrime reporting body in your country, and notify the platform involved, which can sometimes freeze funds still inside its system. Recovering money is rare, and anyone promising to do it for an upfront payment is a second scam layered on the first. The recurring patterns are in the most common crypto scams.

It is convenient, which is not the same thing as safe. Under custody you depend on the company's solvency and security: if it fails, you are one more creditor. FTX filed for bankruptcy on 11 November 2022 with 9 billion dollars of liabilities against 900 million in liquid assets, and creditors of Mt. Gox, which collapsed in February 2014 with 850,000 BTC lost, are still being paid out in dribs and drabs. A MiCA licence improves the guarantees and the segregation of client assets, but it does not make the balance yours in the technical sense. For meaningful amounts, self-custody.

Start with what you can verify: look the firm up in your national regulator's public register of authorised providers, and treat its absence as disqualifying. Then apply three filters that fake operations always fail. One, the return: nobody guarantees a fixed percentage on a volatile asset. Two, the hurry: offers that expire in hours exist so that you do not check anything. Three, the channel: if the contact arrived through an unsolicited message, a social media ad or a messaging group, the odds of fraud are overwhelming. And always arrive by typing the address by hand, never through a link or a sponsored ad.

Very possibly. Buying and holding generally triggers nothing, because without a disposal there is no gain. But moving back into euros or dollars is rarely the only taxable event. In most jurisdictions, swapping one crypto for another, paying for something with crypto and receiving rewards can all count as disposals or as income, even though your bank account never moved. The rates, the categories and the allowances differ enormously from country to country, and so does the treatment of the same transaction, so the only safe answer is the one for your own tax residence. Keep your full transaction history from day one: rebuilding it later is the most common practical headache.

In most tax systems, like a sale. Trading bitcoin for ether disposes of the bitcoin, so a gain or loss is calculated from the difference between the market value of what you receive and the cost basis of what you give up, both expressed in your local currency on the day. That no money passed through your bank changes nothing. It also means every intermediate step can be a reportable event, stablecoins included: going from bitcoin to USDC is a swap, not a cash-out. Jurisdictions differ on the detail and a few treat swaps more leniently, so verify locally. More context in crypto regulation.

Go to the source rather than the platform's own claims. Inside the EU, every national competent authority publishes a register of crypto-asset service providers authorised under MiCA, and ESMA maintains Union-wide registers; a licence from any member state is valid across the bloc, so a firm authorised in Malta or Ireland may legitimately serve you elsewhere in the EU. Search by the legal entity name, not the brand, and check that the licence covers the service you are about to use. Be aware that the phrase 'registered with' is often stretched: an old anti-money-laundering registration is not an authorisation to run an exchange. If a firm cannot be found at all, that is your answer.

Report it. Most tax systems let a realised capital loss offset gains, often within the same year and sometimes carried forward, though the limits and the time windows vary considerably by country. What is fairly universal is that a loss only exists for tax purposes once it is realised: while you neither sell nor swap, a falling price is not deductible. If you lost access to your keys or your funds were stuck on a collapsed platform, the treatment is genuinely unclear in most jurisdictions and usually depends on being able to evidence the loss or the claim. This is a case for a tax adviser rather than a forum.

Not as a sale. Broadly, many jurisdictions treat rewards as income at the moment you receive them, valued in your local currency on that date, and then tax the change in value again as a capital gain or loss when you eventually sell the coins. That means two separate taxable moments, not one, and it is why people are sometimes surprised by a bill on tokens they never sold. Airdrops received without any action on your part are treated differently again depending on the country. Liquid staking adds a further layer, since receiving and redeeming the derivative token may itself be a disposal. Check your own rules and see what is staking.

Three practical things. First, who may serve you: exchanges and custodians need an EU licence, so the list of available platforms has narrowed and some, such as Binance, have withdrawn from the bloc. Second, which stablecoins you will find: only authorised e-money tokens are listed on regulated venues, which is why USDC and EURC are widely available and USDT was delisted, though holding it in self-custody stays legal. Third, what MiCA does not do: it imposes disclosure, custody and reserve requirements on firms, but it does not make any crypto-asset safe, does not guarantee your capital and does not compensate you if the price falls. Detail in crypto regulation.

Because it is sitting in the mempool, the waiting room for transactions that have been broadcast but not yet included in a block, and the fee you offered is not enough for current congestion. On Bitcoin priority is decided by fee per byte; on Ethereum, by the priority fee. In August 2026 this is unusual because the networks are quiet, with Bitcoin at 1 to 2 sat/vB and Ethereum gas at 0.151 gwei, but during demand spikes it is routine. The fix is normally to replace the transaction with a higher fee rather than to wait. See what are gas fees.

It depends. If you sent a token to an address you control on another compatible network, say USDC to your own Ethereum address from a different EVM chain, the funds are usually recoverable by importing that account into a wallet configured for the other network and paying the gas. If the destination was an exchange address, it depends entirely on their support team, which sometimes charges for the rescue and sometimes cannot help at all. If the destination network no longer exists, there is no rescue: the Polygon zkEVM sequencer was shut down on 3 July 2026. Always send a small test amount first.

Once confirmed, no: irreversibility is a design feature, not a bug. While it is still pending you can try to replace it. On Ethereum you send another transaction with the same nonce and a higher priority fee, typically a zero-value send to yourself; validators will take whichever pays more and the first one becomes invalid. Wallets present this as speed up and cancel. Bitcoin has an equivalent if the transaction was flagged as replaceable. Once it is confirmed, the only route left is for whoever received the funds to send them back voluntarily.

Because validators executed your code up to the point where it failed, and that work is paid for even when the outcome is an error. When a transaction reverts, the network state rolls back but the gas already consumed is not returned; you are only refunded the portion of the gas limit you never reached. The usual causes are a slippage tolerance set too tight, a gas limit set too low, or a missing approval. In August 2026, with Ethereum gas at 0.151 gwei, the bill for a failure is a matter of cents. See what are gas fees.

If the address exists and belongs to someone else, no: the transaction is valid and irreversible, and your only option is for the recipient to send them back. If it belongs to a platform, contact their support as soon as possible, because in some cases they can locate the deposit. If the address does not exist or has no known keys, the funds are locked away permanently. This is why you should copy addresses from your wallet's address book rather than from your transaction history, where a lookalike address may have been planted deliberately for you to confuse.

A share is a stake in a company: it carries economic and voting rights over a business that generates profits, with mandatory audits and a regulator behind it. A crypto-asset, in general, represents neither debt nor ownership of anything: its value depends on the usefulness of the network and on what others are willing to pay. The joint SEC and CFTC interpretation of 17 March 2026 acknowledges precisely that most crypto-assets are not themselves securities. That means fewer disclosure duties for the issuer, and fewer protections for you.

Nobody on their own, and that is the hard part to accept. There is no company, no board and no chief executive. The rules live in free software that each user chooses to run, and a change only takes effect if the people running nodes and mining adopt it. Developers propose but cannot impose: publish a version the network will not accept and that version simply sits outside. This architecture makes improvements slow and makes any attempt to change the rules by force extremely expensive. How decisions actually get made is easiest to see in what is crypto mining.

The cap is 21 million units and issuance halves every 210,000 blocks: the fourth halving, on 20 April 2024, cut it to 3.125 BTC per block, and around 2140 it reaches zero. From then on miners earn fees alone. It is the protocol's open question, because fees are today a tiny fraction of their income: as of August 2026 the mempool sits at 1 to 2 sat/vB. Sustaining the same level of security would require far higher fees or a far higher price. Nobody has a tested answer.

It depends on the network, and lumping them together is the usual mistake. Bitcoin uses proof of work: electricity consumption is intrinsic to the security mechanism, and as of 28 August 2026 the network runs at around 893 EH/s. Ethereum abandoned that model at The Merge on 15 September 2022, and its security has rested on locked capital rather than electricity ever since. The real debate about Bitcoin is not how much energy it uses but where that energy comes from and whether it displaces other uses. Detailed comparison in proof of work vs proof of stake.

There are uses that work and uses that get announced. Working today: sending value across borders without intermediaries and in minutes, holding dollar balances where the local banking system fails, and programming agreements that execute themselves through smart contracts. There are also entire sectors built on nothing, with projects whose only utility is selling their own token. The ratio between the two is what the industry has been arguing about for years. One figure for calibration: illicit volume accounts for less than 1 per cent of total crypto volume, according to Chainalysis in January 2026.