The cryptocurrency market is the fastest growing investment marketplace that we have at the moment, if you invest in the right cryptocurrency your money has the potential to grow not just by the hundredfold, in some instances we have seen growth in excess of a thousand percent within a relatively short period of time.
In this piece I shall be talking you through how to get started in cryptocurrency, please note though that this will not be about investment advice, this is more a lay your ducks in a row do the ground work sort of piece.
The first step to take on your journey into the exciting world of cryptocurrencies is to get yourself a wallet, but what is a wallet.
A wallet retains its traditional definition, traditionally it is a place where you store value typically money and in modern times credit/debit cards etc. However, because cryptocurrencies exist in cyber space and not in physical form your wallet then necessarily has to be virtual and not in the physical form.
There are several types of cryptrocurrency wallets that you can have but the three most popular types are: the “Mobile Wallet” , the “Hard Wallet”, and the “Online Wallet”
o A Mobile Wallet can be downloaded to your phone from play store, some of the more popular mobile wallets are: Jaxx, BreadWallet, CoPay, etc.
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o The Hard Wallet looks and functions like a dongle, it is a removable “carry with you” sort of a storage which you can use to store your cryptocurrencies, like a dongle it has to be purchased but unlike a dongle they are not cheap, a good hard wallet would cost you well in excess of a $100 as at the date of writing this.
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o The third and the most widely used are online wallets, some of the more prominent online wallets are some of the most secure places that you can store your cryptocurrencies, one of the leading names in this space is an online wallet called “ Coinbase”, unfortunately, Coinbase does not support all cryptocurrencies, you can only store Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin on it at the moment.
Having now secured yourself a wallet, the next step would be deciding on a coin to buy, to make this decision your first port of call should be a website called “coinmarketcap.com”, there you will find virtually all cryptocurrencies in existence listed (if a coin is not listed on this website I would suggest that you steer clear of it especially if you are a beginner), this website gives you a good snapshot of each individual coin, it tells you how much they are trading for, their market capitalisation, how many coins are in circulation at the moment, etc. It gives you a good summary of the coin and it also signposts you to the coin’s website and other sources of further research. I would highly recommend that this is your next port of call after setting up your wallet, it might even be your first port of call before setting up the wallet, both steps are interchangeable.
Now that you have set up your wallet and done your research, you are ready to buy your first crypto, but where do you buy, there are several platforms for this, , you can buy your cryptos via your wallet provider, most wallet providers offer this facility, you can also buy them through several dedicated websites but the best place to buy a cryptocurrency in my opinion is via an exchange, the exchange takes your method of payment and presents it to the market in exchange for its value equivalent in whatever coin that you are buying, by buying through an exchange you can be sure that you are buying at spot price, there are several exchanges offering this facility, too many to mention, but the two that I use are Changelly and Bittrex.
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