When you first start playing around with cryptocurrency, you will soon see that its easy to get overwhelmed by all the information going around regarding this industry. The way you interact with this "new money" can be costly if you don't have a good understanding of the fees behind the transactions or how block times will affect the sending and arrival times for the amounts you've sent or are expecting to receive.
In this series, I will post tips that will hopefully help you in minimising your losses and maximising your gains, as any good investor should aspire to do!
Some of these might be self-evident, however I think they can be of value for someone that does not have experience in investing and is looking to get into this crazy industry.
1. Regarding your money, don't buy cryptocurrency with money you will need within a short period of time. Longer outlooks are better. Don't use rent money, credit cards or credit lines. Think of the coins you buy as long term investments that carry risk, lots of it.
2. When sending transactions between wallets, always double check first 4 and last 4 digits in the hash sequence to make sure all characters are in the string and that its the right digits. This will speed up your sending and make it less of a hassle.
3. Stay away from services that promise a % return such as hashing services on the cloud. Its better to directly invest or mine yourself as part of a pool than pay a premium.
4. Don't margin trade on exchanges if you are just getting started. You can wipe your balance if you don't have a firm grasp on the concept and coin volatility is huge.
5. When buying to move across exchanges, for example, loading funds into an exchange when you will move it to another, load Ethereum instead of BTC (or other alts if available). This will allow you to move your money much faster across exchanges and for way less fees than BTC. Confirmation times are also faster at the time of writing.
6. Configure 2-Factor authentication on your smart phone. This is a no-brainer. Better to be safe than sorry.
7. Head to a coin's Slack channel or online forums to see common questions or to get a feel of the community within the coin you are looking to invest in.
8. There are many coins out there that have POS algorithms which can give you a double whammy on your money. Instead of letting your money sleep in the exchange, setup the coin's wallet on your PC or on a VPS ( Virtual private servers). OVH offers VPS around the $4.00 /month range and provide good stability if you don't want to keep your PC running 24/7.
That's all for now, but I will be posting more of these as they come to me. Please ask me anything in the section below! I'd be happy to hear your feedback as well or your own experiences in this journey.