Looking to invest or trade cryptocurrencies? This field is full of tricks and traps, let me tell you everything you need to know about it.
Summary:
1/ Buying cryptocurrencies while paying as less fees as possible
2/ Participating in Initial Coin Openings
3/ Earning free coins
4/ Keeping your coins secure
5/ Mining coins with your computer
6/ Escaping the country without paying taxes and live on an island with bonobos.
I / CHAPTER ONE : BUYING CRYPOTOCURRENCY WHILE PAYING AS LESS FEES AS POSSIBLE
OPTION N°1
Open a Coinbase account
https://coinbase.com and transfer your money (USD/EUR) on it, if possible through wire transfert so you will pay less fees. Once your money is on coinbase, do not buy cryptocurrencies, but transfert your money to GDAX.
Buy cryptocurrencies on GDAX: either Bitcoin or Ethereum.
It doesn’t have much importance as we are going to trade them right after.
Open an account on an altcoin marketplace. There is tons of them, but here are the 2 main ones:
https://binance.com : Binance is the leading markeplace right now, it allows you to buy around 100 altcoins. They open new registration few hours a day, so if you are lucky enough to have the possibility to register, take it.
https://cryptopia.co.nz : Gives you access to less known altcoins, they have more than 600 of them.
Transfer your Bitcoins (or Ethereums) from GDAX to your altcoin marketplace.
For that, go to “your balance” section in the altcoin marketplace and click on “deposit” next to Bitcoin (or Ethereum if you bought Ethereum). There, a wallet adress will appear. Copy it and paste it in GDAX, then click send.
Activate the BNB Binance option, with which you will only pay 0.05% of transaction fees!
In order to only pay 0.05%, you will need to have BNB. If you have BNB, the fees will be taken in BNB, otherwise, if you do not have some, you will pay 0.1% of the currency you are receiving. As you will pay fees while buying BNB, the exact amount of fees you will spend is 0.05025%. ;)
0.2% on cryptopia and 0.25%.
OPTION N°2
Open an account on https://litebit.eu : Litebit is one of the leading marketplace for altcoins AND it allows you to buy it directly from euros ! Easy to use and very serious. You can then open an account on Binance, Cryptopia or else if you want other altcoins. The fees can be a bit high compared to the other exchanges but being able to buy altcoins directly from euros is really practical.
II. CHAPTER TWO : PARTICIPATING IN INITIAL COIN OFFERING
That is where coins are usually emitted. Thus, the best way to buy cheap coins is to buy them during ICOs !
First of all, let’s get to know the next ICOs : http://www.coinschedule.com/
… The rating they have : https://icorating.com/
… And look at what people say about them, for example on bitcointalk : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0
There is tens of ethereum wallet, on desktop, on a hard drive, online, on mobile, in the browser… And they all have little differences but here are the main ones:
https://wallet.ethereum.org/
https://99bitcoins.com/goto/exodus
https://metamask.io/
These wallets basically all work the same way : they will create you a private and public key, you should use the private key to open your wallet and the public key to send coins to it. They will also implement security measures and will guide you in setting them up. Always put a strong password.
After creating your wallet, send ethereum to your public address. To save some money, you can adjust the GAS price of the transaction. You can use 10 GWEI and there should be no problem. The more GWEI you put the more your transaction will be prioritized. If you put the GWEI too low, the transaction might fail. I already did a transaction with 5 GWEI and everything went well. But do not adjust the gas limit unit, only the GWEI ! :)
Once you do that, they will present you all the needed information to make the transaction: the minimum you can contribute as well as the contract addresss. Copy and paste this contract address, go to your ethereum wallet, and send the amount of ethereum you want to use to participate in this ICO to that address. Make sure to do your transaction pretty quickly when the ICO starts as many people might want to buy the tokens as well. Some ICOs are done in less than 15 minutes!
CONGRATULATION! You now own some fresh coins, also called tokens! You can see many details about the transaction, save them all, mainly the contract number.
If there is lots of demand during the ICO, it is very likely that the coin will quickly be added in marketplaces and their price multiplied.
III. Earning free coins
All airdrops can be found here : https://airdropalert.com/
All the transactions going to and from your ethereum wallet are here : https://etherscan.io/address/X (you should replace X by your public address)
The inflation fully depends on the coin’s mechanism. For Buzzcoin, you will be awarded around 3% every day and for Stellar Lumens you will be awarded 1% every year.
IV. Keeping your coins secure
-Strong passwords and a different password for each account linked to crypto and your social or professional life. You can use a password manager.
-Use different emails per account.
-Have a good antivirus, firewall and all your softwares and OS up to date.
-ALWAYS use 2 Factors Authentification when possible : Google Authenticator or Duo Mobile, doesn’t matter, just do it. Seriously, many people got hacked because of that.
-Avoid as much as possible to talk about how much you made or invested online. This is also true in real life, but way more important online. If you do so and have some money, you will receive targetted attacks.
-Look online, on different websites, the reviews people made for the exchange or wallet you want to use. Some might be crappy.
-Never trust anyone on crypto-groups (telegram, discord…) and never click on their links. Most might be safe ones, some pages might include a virus, you never know.
V. Mining coins with your computer
You can mine coins by downloading some applications and let them work for you. The main one is provided by Minergate : https://minergate.com
VI. Escaping the country without paying taxes and live on an island with bonobos.
Sorry, there is no island with bonobos. You can only find them in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And I’m not so sure it’d be a cool island. Better pick one with cute humans.
I hope you liked this article, if there is any question on your mind or parts of my article you would like me to elaborate, please tell me in the comments.
