Another slightly retarded here but what I've discovered is that many if not nearly all online 'brokers' never actually buy real stock with your money. They just 'track' the markets, and because 99.9% of people lose their shirt eventually because it's mostly random, they just wait until that happen. If needs be they will suddenly freeze your account or stall withdrawles with bureaucracy. Winning trades will have technical glitches etc. When it comes to crypto I'd even be wary of most exchanges and go straight to buying real currency that you can put in a wallet and actually spend. But does mean having to find an individual to buy from and sell to (e.g. bittylicious). Not sure about paypal but a good test would be whether you can spend the bitcoin at retailers that accept it e.g. newegg does.