Hello fellow Steemians.
Hope you are having a Steemy Sunday. In todays blog I wanted to discuss about the difficulties in trading between different cryptocurreny and what are the options that you have.
If you are new to the whole cryptocurrency market then you must be having a lot of questions and it is very hard to get all the right answers to those questions. The biggest problem that you will face is buying and switching between different cryptocurrency is very complicated and convoluted. Generally there are many descriptions and videos as to how to get into bitcoins but not nearly enough descriptions to get into some other cryptocurrency, and there are a lot of cryptos' out there, last time I checked it was around 870(thats a lot!!).
So yeah its very convoluted to jump from crypto to crypto. So all of you newbies should know the different options that exists so that you can invest in the crypto of your choice.
So for example lets say you want to buy some Dash(one of the many crypto that exists) for yourself, so you would probably have to trade Bitcoins for some Dash and you will have to find a platform that facilitates that. Or you could find a private seller or somebody on the mysterious internet and send them Bitcoins directly and then they will send you some Dash but but but if you try this then practice your due diligence so that you are not just blindly trading with people and sending them some of your hard earned Bitcoins and they run away with that. That would really suck.
Then there are other options too like exchanges which can be Bitrex, Poloniex to name a few. People have their different sort of opinion for different exchanges and whether or not they work well but from what I know and have experienced Poloniex always seem to run into some hardware issues and is kind of slow and also from some of the reviews you can find out that their customer service is not what you would expect, and I am being generous when i say not up to the mark. Hope they sort out their issues quickly otherwise they would start loosing their customer base and it could all go downhill very quickly in this day and age of the internet.
Also if you are using exchanges you should keep in mind that any exchange can de-list an asset without any prior warning so you can have a cryptocurrency on an exchange and that suddenly gets frozen and you cant withdraw, you cant trade so you have to be aware of that. So this is one reason why people don't want their cryptocurrency on an exchange, so in my opinion if you have a cryptocurrency, you should also have a digital cryptocurrency wallet for that cryptocurrency so that you can keep it within your control. This means that if you leave a cryptocurrency on an exchange then that exchange controls your cryptocurrency and you dont actually have it. So you should put it on a hard wallet just to be safe. If there is no option of a hard wallet then just keep it in a hard drive i.e. anything that you can control. So the basic idea is you should control your crypto.
So apart from exchanges another cool options are Changelly or Shaprshift. The great thing about a service like shape shift is that you dont have to maintain an account and all you have to do is have digital wallet address that you control. So for example if you for example have a Bitcoin address and a Steem address all you have to do is go to a service like Shapeshift and you send your Bitcoins and it will send you back Steem and the complete process just takes a couple of minutes and the great part is no account is required, so that is very compelling. Also the customer service for shapeshift is like top notch.
So these are a bunch of options that I have mentioned which I hope will help you in deciding which option to go for.
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