Planning to invest in cryptocurrency? Trading cryptocurrencies is becoming a trend nowadays. If you are a beginner, you might be wondering how to get started. In this episode, learn how you can start buying cryptocurrency as well as get to know the platforms you can check ou that offer its various types. You’ll also discover the basics and some tips you need to learn before you decide to get started on buying cryptocurrency.
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How To Get Started Buying Cryptocurrency
We’re going to address the number one question I seem to get out in public when people hear we have a podcast on blockchain and crypto. They’re like, “I’m thinking about getting into crypto, what do I do? I don’t want to mine stuff because I don’t want my house to blow up.” I was like, “That’s a whole other thing we’ll talk about.”
“How do you do it? How do you take your money and put it into this unstable thing that might go up or down? How do I gamble in digital money?” I don’t know. First of all, I am not an investment advisor. I don’t play one on TV.
We have our disclaimer at the front of our intro. We’re going to tell you the mechanism for doing it, we’re not telling you should do it.
If you should do it, it’s not up to me. It’s up to you and your own conscience. The main entry point for people in the US especially is Coinbase. You go to Coinbase and you set it up. They make sure you’re who you are like in a bank. They want your information on your identity, your Social Security Number, how to tax you on your gains and stuff like that. That’s mostly how people get involved in the US at least. You go to Coinbase, you set up and then you can buy a handful of different cryptocurrencies on that platform. There are other platforms that have lots of different types of cryptocurrencies that you can buy. To get fiat to take your dollars and put them into something digital, Coinbase is your entry point and exit point for that.
That seems fairly simple. It’s like getting a bank account, it’s getting a digital one.
Getting in and getting out, if you lose your passwords, if you lose your information, it can be really tricky. It’s like getting a bank account only you want to write everything down on a piece of paper.
Running through my mind are those spy movies you see with Swiss bank accounts and they’ve got keys.
If someone says there’s some coin that’s not on Coinbase, then you have to find out where that is. You’re going to start learning about wallets and how to move money from Coinbase to Binance or Poloniex and on and on. On each one of those exchanges, you might have access to other cryptocurrencies that may go up or down. It becomes a very big risky game as it always is. Things can get more interesting, it’s more obscure. That’s when you have to learn about all the digits in a wallet and make sure you don’t copy-paste and have space at the end. If your money is sent to the wrong address, it goes into a digital hole and goes away. That’s really scary. It can go away. It’s never found again. You always want to do a little test transaction first of a few dollars, maybe $10 or $20 that you go, “Did that work?” “Okay, I’ll do that again with more.”
Everyone out there, it’s a little Wild, Wild West. You need to be cautious about how you go in and do this. I may have mentioned this on the show. I met this actress in Hollywood at a party that I was at and she said, “I have cryptocurrency,” when she heard we have this podcast. I said, “You do? What made you get into cryptocurrency?” She said, “I had this money because I did this movie. I ended up with excess money and I wanted to invest it in things.” As I looked around, I felt stupid and that was such an interest. She was like, “I didn’t know enough about real estate, I didn’t know enough about stocks and I didn’t know enough about any of these things. It seemed like the old boys’ network had it all locked up and that there was no way I was going to figure out and learn what I needed to know to be successful there.”
These cryptocurrency things seemed wild and untamed and nobody knew anything. It felt like a level playing field to go into that, even though it was risky. It felt riskier for her to go into something that seemed like a fixed game. That’s an interesting mindset. I’ve been trying to get her to come on the show but every time I get her schedule, she gets an audition or something, and she can’t come on. We’ve canceled five times but I’m still going to try it because I thought, “I want to pick her brain and hear more.” That’s an interesting viewpoint here. It is a little scary and it is a little wild, but there are some interesting things going on, things to explore and things to learn. Why not learn from the ground up if you can risk it? Let’s not be putting our nest eggs in here unless you can. Is there anything else that they should know and be aware of? Besides Coinbase and getting started, if they wanted to take cryptocurrency payments for something, can they still use Coinbase through that?
To take cryptocurrency, yes. You can take it but you only can take certain ones. If someone says, “I’m going to send you my Dogecoin or whatever,” you can’t be like, “Here’s my Bitcoin address.” That’s not going to work. The Bitcoin address only holds Bitcoin itself.
With Coinbase, can you hold Bitcoin and other types of crypto? Can you hold it as if you were holding it in multiple foreign denominations?
Every wallet is specific to the kind of currency or the type of technology it’s built on. It can be tricky.
You may have to have more than one. I hope that answers the questions that we’ve been getting out there. This is how you do it. You dive in, try it, go in, get a wallet and get going.
That’s what you’ve got to do.
Thanks, Monika. I’m so glad you helped enlighten us. Now I have a clear answer to everyone because this is of course not my side of it. I’m always looking at the blockchain side of the innovation and not necessarily the cryptocurrency.
The crypto side is a little scary. It can be freaky. You can easily lose money and you can also make it. Crypto is its own animal. It’s separate from the blockchain. If you want to get into it, most people are using crypto like day traders. It’s not that they’re using crypto as a long-term investment. If they are, that’s great, but a lot of people are in it to do small. They want to see things get volatile. Right now, it is a little volatile. It goes up and down by quite a bit.
That’s maybe the next good question for us to answer them. Where would they get good industry information and be able to watch what’s going on? We go to the Wall Street Journal to watch what’s going on in the stock market. Where do they go?
To get good information, you want to make sure that you can look at a lot of diverse information and compare and contrast because everybody’s got an opinion. Here we are in the show, we’re sharing opinions. Everybody’s got them. You can’t always take one person’s word for it. Seeing what some people have done when they say, “This is my track record. This is what I’ve made. This is why.” That’s great. I have one friend who is like, “If Ethereum which follows Bitcoin goes above, this is a resistance level. If it goes above 140, it’s going to keep going up until it’s over 160. If it breaks 165, it’s going to go up at least to 180.” I said, “Really?” He said, “This is always what it does. These are the action points because this is not human trading.”
He shows me a graph and he was like, “This is why this thing happens and that thing happens.” I was like, “How do you know this?” That’s all he’s done for seven years. He stared through that and studied it. It can be boring for some people. Have I ever bought the Euro thinking about how it’s going to go up or down? No, I just go, “Is it a better deal right now or not?” “I don’t know.” “Is the dollar very strong?” I’m going to Europe, so it doesn’t matter. It is what it is. In cryptocurrency, there are more opportunities to use that volatility. It’s like Forex on steroids.
I do want to remind our audience that I did an interview with Gary Leland, The Crypto Podcaster. He has four different shows. One of them is a daily show that has five to ten minutes where he talks about something going on in the cryptocurrency news. That might be a great second source as you were saying to get some different viewpoints out there. He’s going to discuss what’s being stated in the news, so you’ll at least hear what’s going on in the news. You’ll hear his viewpoint because he’s been in it for a while, he has been in it for about five years. He’s got a good viewpoint as well. Please read the episode with Gary Leland because he is really interesting. He’s quite an amazing podcaster on top of it.
Thanks, Monika. I’m so glad that you updated everybody and gave us a little direction on how to get started and how to look into things. Everyone out there, NewTrustEconomy.com, send us a message, go to social media, @NewTrustEconomy. Send us a message and ask us these questions. Nothing is too basic. If we need to step back and break it down again, we’re happy to because we don’t want to leave people behind here. Our goal is to translate what’s going on in the industry, what’s happening around there and look at that from my viewpoint, from an innovation and a business perspective. Monika is looking at it from a financial, real estate and from all of these types of market perspectives, which is interesting as well. We’re trying to put perspective on these things but if we’re missing out on basic understanding, we’ve got to know that so we can help you. Also, I want to remind everyone, Monika wrote a book called Blockchain 101. If you do want some basics, download it. It’s on Amazon and on our website, NewTrustEconomy.com and it’s on Monika Proffitt’s website as well. Thanks, everyone.
We’ll catch you next time on The New Trust Economy.
Important Links:
- Coinbase
- Binance
- Poloniex
- Gary Leland – previous episode
- @NewTrustEconomy – Facebook
- Blockchain 101
- Monika Proffitt