Free guide · 9 min · facts checked 13 October 2026

What a bitcoin trade really costs you

The percentage printed in large type on a fee schedule is one of five costs, and often not the biggest. Add them up once and a lot of advertising stops working on you.

There is no single price of bitcoin

Each platform runs its own market, so each has its own price. On 10 October 2025, Bitcoin touched a low of $107,000 on Coinbase, $102,000 on Binance and $100,000 on Kraken. Three platforms, three floors, one day.

The number you see in the news is an average, or the reading of one platform. In normal times the gaps stay small, because traders buy where it is cheaper and sell where it is dearer. In a panic, the gaps widen, and that is exactly when people trade.

Inside one platform, the price comes from two lists meeting: waiting buy orders ranked from the highest bid, and waiting sell orders ranked from the lowest ask. The best bid and the best ask never touch, and the gap between them is the spread. The quantity available at each price level is the depth. Together they measure liquidity: how much you can trade without moving the price yourself.

The five costs of a round trip

A purchase followed by a sale carries five separate costs.

Execution fees, charged on the purchase and again on the sale.
The spread: you buy at the ask and sell at the bid. On “simple buy” screens it is often built into the price without being shown.
Slippage, if your order is larger than the quantity available at the best price. The displayed price only holds for the quantity sitting at that level; beyond it, the order climbs the book and your average price is worse than the one you saw.
Withdrawal fees, usually fixed, when you take bitcoin or money out of the platform.
Network fees, when you transfer bitcoin.

Only the first one is advertised. The second is invisible by design, the third appears after you commit, and the last two arrive at the end.

Network fees are the one line that has nothing to do with the amount you send: they depend on how busy the network is. On 20 April 2024, users paid 37.63 bitcoins in fees to be included in a single block, block 840,000. On 12 October 2026, a block earned on average 0.026 bitcoin in fees, more than a thousand times less.

How much the price has to move before you break even

Costs are paid twice, on the way in and on the way out, so the price must rise by the full round trip before you are back to zero.

Round trip	What it costs	Total	Rise needed to break even
$2,000	0.5% buy, 0.5% sell, 0.2% spread, no withdrawal	$24	1.2%
$500	1.5% per trade, 1% spread, $15 withdrawal	$35	7%

Both fee schedules are invented for the example, and none of these lines appears in an advertisement. The arithmetic is what matters: a fixed cost weighs more the smaller the amount. A $15 withdrawal is 3% of $500 and 0.15% of $10,000.

This also answers the “0% fees” promise. No commission says nothing about the price at which you are served: the platform can earn the same money through a wider spread built into the price. The only way to compare is to look at the price offered against an order book at the same moment.

One more cost hides in the order types. An order can guarantee that it gets executed, or it can guarantee a price, never both. A stop order at $55,000 does not mean “I will sell at $55,000”; it means “when the price touches $55,000, sell at the price of the moment”. If the market falls from $56,000 to $52,000 in seconds, the sale happens near $52,000. A stop-limit protects the price instead, and may simply not be filled, leaving you exposed while you believe you are out.

Why a fall and its recovery are not the same number

This is the most expensive piece of arithmetic in the subject, and it has nothing to do with fees. A 50% fall is not recovered by a 50% rise: it takes a doubling. The deeper the fall, the wider the gap. An amount that falls by 80% has to be multiplied by five, a rise of 400%, just to return to where it started.

Bitcoin has supplied the figures.

Episode	Peak to trough	Duration
December 2017 – December 2018	−84.3%, from $19,892 to $3,129	363 days
12 – 13 March 2020	−51.6%, from $7,969 to $3,858	under two days
November 2021 – November 2022	−77.6%, from $69,000 to $15,460	376 days
October 2025 – July 2026	−54.3%, from $126,296 to $57,718	268 days

Falls are measured from high to low on one platform. Turning each one around is arithmetic, not a forecast: after the falls of 2018 and 2022, Bitcoin eventually exceeded its previous peak, and whether it will exceed the record of October 2025, or when, nobody knows. Nothing establishes it.

Put the two halves of this guide together and the picture is complete. Costs make the break-even point sit above where you bought. Asymmetry makes the climb back from a fall longer than the fall itself. Neither is an opinion about Bitcoin; both are true of any volatile asset bought and sold at a cost.

What to work out before, not after

The fee on the purchase and the fee on the sale, as a percentage, from the published schedule.
The spread at the moment you trade, read from an order book rather than from a “simple buy” screen.
The fixed withdrawal fee, and what percentage of your amount it represents.
The total of all of it, converted into the rise the price needs before you are back to zero.

Four numbers, two minutes. They do not tell you whether to trade. They tell you what the trade has to beat.

Where this comes from

This guide condenses lessons 3.1 and 3.2 of our 3-day course. Those lessons add a fictional order book you can buy from, two orders put through the same sudden drop, a cost calculator across three invented fee schedules, and a tool that turns any fall into the rise needed to undo it.

Try the calculators Read the free lesson See the programme

Nothing here tells you to buy, sell or hold anything, and nothing is urgent. The course is education only: 12 lessons, 83 cited sources.

Get the security checklist

Two printable pages: twelve points to tick, each with the reason it matters, and the steps to take if something has already gone wrong. It is the checklist from day 2 of the course, in a form you can keep beside you.

Sources

Prices read from the public interfaces of the three platforms for 10 October 2025, universal time. Falls are measured from high to low on one platform. Fees read from the public ledger: 37.63 bitcoins out of the 40.75 collected by the miner of block 840,000; average of fifteen blocks on 12 October 2026. The fee schedules in the examples are invented. These figures describe the past and say nothing about future moves.