If your are new to the cryptocurrency community there are a couple things you need to grasp mentally, immediately before purchasing any cryptocurrency. First, you can buy in fractions; A bitcoin as of January 10, 2018 cost about 14,600$ and most people that first enter cryptocurrency believe they have to spend 14,600 to get one Bitcoin (BTC). However, this is not the case because bitcoin and other coins can be bought in small fractions; smaller than the one cent fractions of the United States Dollar (USD). The second most crucial thing that new cryptonians must understand is that Bitcoin is an energy inefficient system. Mining bitcoin, or rather verifying transactions with computer hardware, takes an immense amount of energy. At the rate that energy is being consumed by a growing Bitcoin mining community, it will consume more energy than the entire rest of the world by 2020. The third thing that skeptics and new cryptonians must understand is that Bitcoin is the oldest un-hackable network. Since 2009 and the creation of Bitcoin, the system has never been hacked because Bitcoin's public ledger makes the open source code only modifiable if 51% of the entire computing power of the Bitcoin network agrees to change the code. Bitcoin is a true computational democracy in that way. The only way to change past transactions would be to use a computer stronger than more than half of Bitcoin's entire network. Fourthly, the security of your cryptocurrency depends entirely on the security of your home computer and the passwords and private keys for all of your cryptocurrency wallets. Essentially, if you store your cryptocurrency off of the exchanges, which you should do, then your cryptocurrency is as secure as you make it. You could possibly encrypt your keys or spread them in random text files on a computing device, but if anyone is allowed access remotely or physically to your keys, then your cryptocurrency funds are as good as compromised. The last and final tip for new cryptonians would to have written backups of all your private keys; there is an estimated 5,000,000 BTC lost because of lost or forgotten passwords.
