Mostly I host tea parties, but since some of the tea parties I host are Cryptocurrency themed I am increasingly seen as an expert in the field.
That perception is not quite accurate, but I am not an idiot, and I've been interested in crypto for much longer than most of my friends making me relatively knowledgeable.
I am writing this as a primer for friends who are just coming onto the scene.
This is not investment advice.
That would be an easy way to get into trouble. :P
First thing you need to know is probably where to buy:
If you are a drug dealer and you want to remain anonymous than Bitcoin ATMs are probably your best bet, but otherwise you should probably use an exchange like GDAX.
I used to recommend Coinbase to super beginners, but the fees are stupid and if you can't manage GDAX you probably shouldn't put any money into crypto.
GDAX is great because it has no market maker fees, but it is limited to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and now Bitcoin Cash.
This limitation is severe, but it's a good place to start.
If you don't know anything except the names than you should probably not get too involved in what you don't understand.
Many good friends started with these four and used only the profits made off of these investments to diversify. I now think this may be the best tact because you will be taxed for exchanging these coins for other coins, and they are most likely to be the most stable of whatever is on the market because they have the best support all over the world.
The next thing you will need will be a more advanced exchange. The most popular options can be found here.
In order of today's rankings:
Binance is great because fees are paid in BNB coin and because they have a great selection and high volume. Their Chinese name is 币安 (coin peace) and they have a lot of Asian projects that you can't get on Bittrex. I believe that it is for this reason that they have recently passed Bitfinex and Bittrex in volume.
Bithumb is Korean only. They have strict KYC/AML.
Bitfinex is not allowing registrations right now because they are for pro traders and all of the small accounts are slowing things down. They are international, but Americans and Chinese are disallowed.
Bittrex.com is a California based company and one of the few legal options for New York customers. They have a great selection and volume but are somewhat limited in Asia based projects and coins which would run them afoul of the SEC.
OkEx was big in China before the most recent ban. Their primary address is in Belize, but they also have a correspondence address in Hong Kong. They do not allow customers from Hong Kong, China, or the USA.
Poloniex is the old standard for US based traders. The selection may look limited to noobs, but I expect a resurgence in some of their selection which is being overlooked as so many new coins and tokens are released in a steady stream. Withdrawal limits are low in order to encourage KYC.
Huobi is another Chinese exchange that took a hard hit with the ban. They still have a strong Korean presence, and have recently made a partnership with SBI in Japan. (SBI is the Comcast of Japan)
GDAX is way down to #8 in terms of volume because they only have USD trading pairs. Also, I bet some people are still sore about the handover of user info (20k+ transfers got narked) to the IRS after a subpoena.
I'll skip two on the list to get to HitBTC who has a really comprehensive collection of coins and an ICO trading platform.
Aside from these popular exchanges you should know about Shapeshift, Changelly, and Evercoin.
These trade out of your personal wallets in order to avoid counterparty risk.
If an exchange gets hacked you will loose a percentage of your holdings. Beware.
Also, many platforms now offer distributed exchange (Dex) for their own custom tokens, such as Waves and Bitshares.
The third generation of exchange tech is coming on line as we speak.
Bitcoin's new Lightning Network makes "Atomic Swapping" possible for all segwit activated coins, and many ERC20 tokens as well.
When this becomes accessible to the mainstream it will pose a serious problem to centralized exchanges, but we are still a few months away. Altcoin.io has a testnet online as of last week.
Since we haven't had a major exchange hack in a while people don't find out about wallets as quickly as they used to.
But, wallet tech is developing at a speed consummate to every other aspect of the crypto space.
Hardware wallets are still the best option for security, other than paper wallets.
Trezor and [Ledger}(https://www.ledgerwallet.com/) are the most popular.
Jaxx is to my knowledge the first secure and popular multicurrency phone wallet.
Coinomi has a very different selection of coins focusing more on pow coins and less on ERC20.
Samourai wallet is supposed to be a good privacy focused phone wallet, but I don't understand why they need so many permissions and I've not looked into it enough to recommend them.
#(Coin Market Cap)[https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/)
Here you will find almost everything you need to discover, assess, and keep tabs on new coins and tokens.
Buy low and sell high isn't just for price. If you want to make the most of you money you also want to buy low marketcap. For those who don't know anything about investing, market cap is the price of an asset multiplied by the number of available units.
If you google "Jinn coin" (an NXT token who lists neither a website nor source code on CMC and is only found on the NXT Dex) you will find articles referencing that the price is now above that of Ethereum. Sounds good, right?
Not so fast!
Once you consider that they have a supply of only 59k coins a market cap of only 122m may be easy to collect from people who just see the volatility and want to make easy money on day trading without ever looking into the coin... Buyer Beware!
Notice that this is the first time that I have made a distinction between "coins" and "tokens".
The difference is not well recognized, but it is used by CMC.
Basically, a coin is an independent chain and a token is issued by another chain such as Ethereum, Waves, Burst, Qtum, etc.
The view all pages are far more useful than the default view, and you can choose to view all everything coins or tokens.
(My link above is to view all cryptocurrencies)
Everything important should be found linked to CMC.
The blockchain explorer can give you a basic understanding of the health of the blockchain including distribution. If the stupid link on CMC doesn't give you access to the distribution and a richlist, and it's not Monero, than you might have to google it.
You won't find anything with a better distribution than BTC so far as i am aware.
BTC was a slightly awkward example because they don't have a link to the source code, but most legitimate projects do.
A basic familiarity with Github is good, but you can start just looking at "Insights"
This is what an active Github looks like.
Be wary of a project that has no or few updates in a month.
"Charts" has a line graph that sucks compared to most exchanges, but it's complete whereas many exchanges are newer than a coin like ETH, so you might find it useful from time to time.
"Markets" tells you where to buy.
"Social" has a feed for Twitter, etc. and is very useful to keep track of many projects from a single website.
"Tools" includes a website ticker API
And, "Historical Data" is obvious.
Probably more useful historical data for a beginner however are the general tools "Historical Snapshot" where you find charts for random days going back to 2013.
And, of course you may need a currency converter, also found under "tools" on any page.
I think that is pretty good for a beginner article.
I am sure that it is incomplete and containing a few errors as I have written it stream of consciousness for a friend.
If people find it useful than maybe I will revise it.
Be well,
<3