Set your payout wallet: an exchange or your own wallet
Should mined bitcoin go straight to an exchange or to a wallet you control? The trade-off, the checks, and how to change your payout address.
Intermediate
Your machines pay the bitcoin they mine to one address: your payout address. It can belong to a wallet you control, or it can be a deposit address at an exchange. Both work. They are not the same thing, and the choice decides who holds your bitcoin the moment it is mined.
The trade-off
Payout goes to
What you gain
What you give up
Your own wallet
You hold the keys. Nobody can freeze or lend out your bitcoin.
One extra transfer, and one network fee, each time you cash out.
An exchange deposit address
Simple. The bitcoin is already where you sell or spend it.
The exchange holds it. You depend on its rules, its solvency and your account staying open.
Mining to your own wallet
This is the default most owners choose. The bitcoin arrives in a wallet whose seed phrase only you hold, and you send to an exchange only the part you want to cash out, when you want to. If an exchange closes your account, changes its terms or stops serving your country, your mined bitcoin is not affected. The price is a little more work each time you sell. See Cold storage basics and SafePal wallet setup.
Mining straight to an exchange
This suits owners who sell or spend most of what they mine soon after it arrives, for example with a card. There is nothing to move: each payout lands in the exchange account. The cost is that an exchange balance is a promise from a company, not bitcoin you hold. A mining payout also arrives as many small deposits from a mining pool, and not every exchange handles that well. Check the points below before you choose this.
How to get a BTC deposit address on an exchange
Sign in to the exchange on its official website or app.
Open the deposit screen. It is usually under Assets, Wallet or Funding. The exact menu name may differ.
Choose BTC as the asset.
Choose Bitcoin as the network. Not BEP20, not Lightning, not any other option in the list.
Copy the address with the copy button. A Bitcoin address starts with bc1, 1 or 3. An address that starts with 0x is not a Bitcoin network address.
Save the address in a note together with the date and the name of the exchange.
Send a small test amount from your own wallet and confirm it is credited before you use the address for payouts.
Careful: Some exchanges rotate deposit addresses, expire addresses that have not been used, or do not credit deposits under a minimum amount. A mining payout sent to an expired address or below the minimum can be lost or stuck for weeks. Before you give an exchange address as your payout address, confirm with the exchange that the address is permanent and that small, frequent deposits are accepted.
Questions to ask the exchange first
Is this BTC deposit address permanent, or can it change or expire?
If you issue me a new address, do deposits to the old one still arrive?
What is the minimum BTC deposit, and what happens to a deposit below it?
Do you accept deposits that come directly from a mining pool?
For a business account: must deposits come from a wallet the business owns?
Ask through the support chat inside the exchange's website or app and keep the written answer. If the answers are unclear, mine to your own wallet and send to the exchange yourself.
How to change your payout address at Firsthand Bitcoin
Decide on the new address and test it: send a small amount to it yourself and see it arrive.
Write an email to hello@firsthandbitcoin.com from the email address of your Firsthand Bitcoin account, so the request can be matched to you.
Paste the new address as text, not as a photo, and say which machines or which account it applies to.
Say whether the address belongs to your own wallet or to an exchange, and which one.
Wait for Firsthand Bitcoin to confirm the change with you. We verify every address change with the owner before applying it.
After the confirmation, watch Earnings and your wallet or exchange account to see the next payout arrive at the new address.
Good to know: The confirmation step protects you: if someone gets into your email, they cannot quietly redirect your payouts. Firsthand Bitcoin will never ask for your seed phrase. If you receive a message you did not expect that tells you to change your payout address, do not act on it and write to hello@firsthandbitcoin.com.