Buying bitcoin in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Bitcoin is a decentralised ledger with no central issuer and a fixed maximum supply of 21 million coins. Its value comes from market supply and demand, not from an underlying company, cash flow or promise from an issuer.

That makes it fundamentally different from a share or bond: there is no dividend, no annual report and no legal protection against a fall in value. The price can move sharply, even within a single day.

Under the MiCA regulation, providers offering crypto services in the EU must hold a CASP (crypto-asset service provider) licence and identify customers through KYC: an ID document, address verification and sometimes a short questionnaire about the source of funds.

After onboarding, you transfer euros via SEPA, iDEAL or Bancontact, and the provider sells you bitcoin at a rate they set themselves. That rate almost always includes a margin above the market price — the real cost of a purchase often sits in the spread rather than in a separately listed fee.

After purchase, coins usually sit in an account with the provider. That is convenient, but it means you do not control the private keys: if the provider fails or is hacked, you depend on their custody arrangements and any compensation scheme.

Self-custody means moving the coins to a wallet where you hold the keys. You then take responsibility for backing up your recovery phrase, but remove counterparty risk at the provider. Block #9 is built around that principle: buying and swapping is routed across liquidity sources while coins remain in self-custody rather than in a pooled account on the platform.

In Belgium, a gain on bitcoin is in practice usually treated as a non-taxable result of normal management of private assets, provided you are not trading speculatively or professionally. Frequent transactions, leveraged products or activity resembling a profession can push the tax authorities to classify it as miscellaneous income (33%) or even professional income. There is no hard threshold; it is assessed case by case.

In the Netherlands, bitcoin falls under box 3 wealth tax. The value on the reference date of 1 January counts, regardless of what happens to the price for the rest of the year. You may owe box 3 tax on coins you already sold on 2 January.

The most common mistake is leaving large amounts on a trading platform long-term out of convenience, without weighing counterparty risk. A second is underestimating the spread on repeated small purchases, which pushes effective costs higher than expected. A third is failing to record purchase dates and amounts, making later tax filing or wealth reporting unnecessarily difficult.