Violet Rollergirl’s guide to using cryptocurrency via Coinbase
If you’re reading this page, you’re ready to pay in crypto. Awesome! Moreover, you’ve chosen to use Coinbase as your cryptocurrency exchange. Here’s what you should do.
Many of these steps only have to be done once. Once finished, you can simply buy more crypto and then send it to your provider whenever you need to make payments.
ⓘ This page is for clients or customers. If you are a provider, seller, or vendor you should instead read Violet Rollergirl’s Resources for Providers Using Cryptocurrency (as a Sex Worker).
In this guide
- Create your Coinbase account
- Add a payment method to your Coinbase account
- Complete your crypto purchase via Coinbase
Create your Coinbase account
Creating your Coinbase account is a multi-step process that requires you to:
- verify an email and phone number
- submit personal information to Coinbase to verify your legal identity
- upload your legal identity documents
Coinbase requires this because, despite claims to the contrary, Coinbase is not a wallet but rather a banking service. They also periodically change their account creation process due to changing financial regulations but thankfully the process only needs to be performed once and they maintain good guides on their site:
Once your Coinbase account is created and validated, you can proceed to adding a payment method.
Add a payment method to your Coinbase account
With a Coinbase account, you can use their currency exchange services but you still need to supply Coinbase with payment information so that you can swap your existing US Dollars (or other local currency) into cryptocurrencies. Coinbase enforces different purchase limits on different payment methods, but in general any payment method you have like a debit card or bank account will work. They also have good guides to help you add a payment method, so follow those instructions now:
Depending on the payment method you chose and how you linked it, you may be able to buy crypto immediately or you may need to validate the method with a confirmation loop of some kind. Either way, once linked and activated, you will see your purchase limits on Coinbase increase and are ready to get your first crypto coins.
Complete your crypto purchase via Coinbase
Once you create your Coinbase account and add a payment method to it, you can use Coinbase to exchange some of your existing local money into crypto. This is Coinbase’s entire purpose for existing, so they make it really easy to do this.
At this point, Coinbase will show you that you have a positive crypto balance in your “wallet” (which is really a bank account, not a true wallet). You can now use that balance to pay your worker in crypto!
