Note: This is a new guide that includes the addendum noted below the original content w/ other minor edits.
One of many easier ways of buying and having usable Bitcoin:
- Download, install, and open CashApp on your phone.
- Make an acct if needed, log in. Tie a debit card to it. DO NOT USE A BANK ACCOUNT/ACH Transfer. This will take several days vs. instant w/ debit.
- Swipe or navigate to left side of the main app, you'll see Bitcoin. It's under the little house looking icon section.
- Tap Bitcoin, then tap Buy. It has some preset suggestions, but buy as much or as little as you need.
- Complete the order. That BTC is immediately ready for use or transfer.
DO NOT USE CASHAPP AS YOUR SENDING WALLET FOR YOUR ONLINE ACTIVITIES. You can imagine it'd be way easier to tie you to something if your BTC wallet and digital market/bank were the same app.
- Pick another BTC wallet. Any, I use Cake Wallet since Samourai died and then Green failed me one too many times and I lost BTC. Cake is just the wallet du jour for me, but use anything. Non-custodial wallets are best. Do more research on that and all this, quite frankly.
- Make a new, regular non-special no frills wallet in the new app, and copy the BTC address it contains to receive funds. Usually all default options are fine when setting one up. Unless you want to add 2FA, which is always a good idea, but optional.
- Once the new wallet is installed, go through CashApp and where it shows Buy, it also has a up/down arrow button. Tap that, then tap Send.
- Enter the amount of BTC you wish to transfer to the new wallet, and then paste the address you copied from your other, new wallet. That will let CashApp find your new wallet, send the funds to the Blockchain, and depending on what priority you put on the transfer it could take 2-24 hours. Roughly. It's usually fairly quick.
Addendum [Sept 2025]:
It occurred to me one night that the frequency at which one is buying BTC in this manner, by taking out a few hundred or even more on a regular or perhaps even semi-regular basis, that one's bank and/or CashApp might consider this a suspicious pattern and lock your account or at least flag it internally in some way.
I have only heard of one report of a locked CashApp account so far, and I don't know if that was the root cause, but it got me thinking about other ways to leverage it to send the purchased BTC to an external wallet without directly involving "CashApp" showing on your bank statement repeatedly. It's obviously a bigger deal to have your checking account frozen vs. CashApp for a lot of folks. So, I remembered you can literally add cash to CashApp at many retailers for a $1 fee.
Banks know people need cash for a variety of reasons and probably don't look super closely at how many times you hit up an ATM per week/month/etc. As long as you aren't maxing out if you have, for example, a $500/day withdrawl limit. Do that day after day and you have the pattern issue again to worry about. Avoid that. Anyways...
As an alternative to the above method, to add funds to CashApp instead of using your linked debit card every time:
First, review the initial information above to acquaint yourself with the app if it's new to you. I am not going to repeat that same info below.
- Head to your local ATM and take out however much you want to put into CashApp.
- Go to a participating store (find one in-app) and pull the app up and generate the code to add funds direct to the app. It's intuitive enough, so I won't explain that part further.
- Show it to the cashier and say you would like to add X amount of cash to your CashApp account.
- They will scan it and take your cash.
- Let several minutes pass and your CashApp balance will reflect what you gave the cashier minus $1 (the retailer might rarely have their own fee, but I haven't encountered that yet)
Ex: I give the cashier $300, in a few mins I open CashApp and the balance in there is $299. I did this without any issues the other day myself. After all, why give out advice that's untested?
- CashApp is already setup to first take funds from your CashApp balance and then from the linked debit card. Don't buy more BTC than you have in your CashApp balance.
- Proceed as normal and transfer out the BTC you bought to an external wallet.
That's it. Now your bank statements reflect ATM withdrawals, which I would argue are much less suspect to grabbing their attention than seeing many CashApp withdrawals. I have no proof of this, but it makes sense to me in theory.