Crypto The Simple Cryptocurrency Guide for Newbies

There's a lot of noise in the Cryptocurrency sphere at the moment. A LOT.

It's probably in a bubble, there's lots of scams and the prices are really, really volatile.

However, if you have some money lying around that you can afford to lose, it is worth a play. If only to learn about this new asset class and stake your claim in its future.

There's heaps of strategies, shiny new things and ideas coming up all the time. No mere mortal can ever be across all of it, don't even bother trying. You'll get hurt and the stress isn't worth it.

This is a simple strategy for newbies that I have arrived at after months of insanity. I thought I'd share. If you're more experienced or have an appetite for bigger risks, look elsewhere. This is designed to minimise volatility and be a more relaxed trundle through the chaotic insanity of crypto investing.

Disclaimer...this is only one amateur's viewpoint on an unregulated, highly volatile werenotreallysurewhatthisis asset class. Only put in money that you're able to lose. I own lots of the coins mentioned in here too, but I'm certainly not writing this with the intention of spruiking here...just trying to help.

So without further ado...

THE SIMPLE CRYPTO GUIDE FOR NEWBIES

1. Start with Coinspot. Get an account here. Yes, its expensive, you can't add any money till January, the interface is very basic and its probably monitored by the ATO, but its the safest place to play when you're starting out, and more importantly it gives you a large choice of coins to choose from. If you manage to survive 6 months or so, you'll probably outgrow it, but this is a guide for newbies so start here first.

2. Work out how much you're going to put into crypto. You could easily lose the lot so have a good think about how much you're willing to put in and add it to your coinspot account fully accepting the risks. DO NOT USE BORROWED MONEY. For the rest of this post I'm going to assume you're putting in 1k AUD.

3. Buy some coins....but probably not Bitcoin. In crypto it's a game of may the best idea win. And as of writing that is currently not the famous bitcoin. So what do you buy? Well, there are lots of different coins and they all do different things. They all have different business models and are backed by different communities/corporations. It will do your head in keeping up and this guide is supposed to be simple. So I'll make it easy. This is a list of coins in order of market cap. Bitcoin is always at the top, but we're ignoring it at the moment, so what you want to do is split your initial investment into 10 pieces (in this example 10 x $100) and buy $100 of coins 2 through to 8 on the list.


These will all be "good" coins and reasonably safe(ish) bets. That will use up 70 percent of our intial investment. We now have 30 percent (3 coins) left for learning.

Buy two coins in the middle of the list. If you have time, do a bit of research. If you can't be stuffed then buy either PIVX, Stellar, Verge or Neo. Take you're pick and choose two.

Now we're at 90%...we have enough cash left for just one more coin. The moonshot coin! Buy something down the bottom of the list. Do a bit of research if you wish. Once again if you can't be stuffed choose either Power Ledger or Walton.

4. Security. Right - now you own your coins the trick is to keep them. Your strategies here will depend on how much coin you put in.
- If you only put in 1-2k I would leave everything on the exchange. This is normally not recommended, but this guide is for newbies and the chances of losing the coins through human error probably outweighs the risk of leaving them on coinspot.
- If you have more than 2k worth of coins it's time to get serious. There's lots of ways to store coins safely but if you get it wrong scammers can nick them, so in this instance buy yourself a ledger nano s. This is a hardware wallet with the best balance between usability and security.It will take a while to get the hang of but you simply have to do it. No ifs or buts.

5. HODL = Hold on for dear life. If you watch the prices daily, you'll freak yourself out. Don't do it. Check only on Fridays or once a month, or better still don't check them at all. Put the ledger nano S somewhere safe and forget about it. Come back in 3 months. Checking crypto prices is bad for your health.

6. Sell. Once you get to a point where it could be a new IP or a portfolio of shares, or you've made so much money that you CAN'T afford to lose it...then it's time to sell. I have had luck selling 70% of the portfolio and keeping the other 30% doing its thing. It has been growing back like a weed.
!!You'll need to remember that selling your coins is a CGT event!!

Anyway, that's about it. At least for newbies. There's tonnes of other stuff that is worth learning about and can make money in other ways, but if you're just starting out this isn't a bad way to go. I wouldn't go into this expecting the huge returns of 2017...but it should trundle along hopefully heading north for you.

Good luck!

 

How safe would he free wallet offered by Blockchain.com be in your opinion?

 

Ok for small amounts. Over 2k you should be thinking cold storage or a ledger.

 

Brilliant

 

As safe as your phone security

 

I would still buy bitcoin personally, I’m still very bullish on it

 

OK

 

Great summary, I’m going share this to all my friends who keep asking me questions.

 

*Not me but 5 strangers gave it gold on Reddit so must be good

I've created an Excel Crypto Portfolio Tracker that draws live prices and coin data from CoinMarketCap.com. Here is how to create your own. • r/CryptoCurrency



I created this sample portfolio tracker in Excel that draws live data from the CoinMarketCap API and refreshes on demand. If you have holdings across various exchanges (XRB at Bitgrail, BTC at GDAX, REQ at Binance...etc) this allows you to consolidate your entire portfolio, and also to value it more accurately in Satoshis and US dollars. Its also much quicker than logging into a site and allows for the full capability of Excel to analyze, you can run all the functions, graphs...etc that you want.

One of the things that the exchanges generally get terribly wrong is portfolio valuation and tracking. In addition to often not showing you the dollar price per coin, they also show the spot price at their exchange rather than the average across all exchanges. In many altcoins there can be quite a large spread in price between your exchange and the market average, and it generally always tends to move towards the average as arbitrage removes the difference. This is why its often better to value your portfolio using the prices on CoinMarketCap, which derives prices by "taking the volume weighted average of all prices reported at each market."

In my example file, I've only added the price feed for a few popular coins, but you can get live data for any coin on CMP by doing this:

1) Go to http://coinmarketcap.com and select the coin you are interested in.

2) Click the Tools tab and copy paste the link under API Tracker. For example, lets use DASH. The API tracker link can be seen on the tools page and is: https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/dash/

3) Go into the Excel spreadsheet and click the Data tab. Select New Query -> From Other Sources -> From Web, here is a screenshot. Copy paste the API link into the box, click OK.

Note: If your version of Excel doesn't have Query Editor installed by default, you can get it from the Microsoft site.

4) This will load the Query Editor like in this screenshot. Simply click on the Record field in the table and it should expand to look like this. Click on Convert Into Table on top.

5) This will make a nice table for you to import into a new spreadsheet, you can name it by changing the Name field on the right side.

6) Click save to import and this will make a new sheet with the name entered in the Name field. The data will automatically refresh every time you open the file. You can also manually refresh at any time by clicking Refresh All under the Data tab.

You can also make a quick macro to Refresh All and assign it to a button to add to the spreadsheet to make it even faster.

Having it all in Excel makes it easy to chart and analyze now.

I can also post the full excel file if someone is interested.

Happy investing

 

Sure, but with this guide you are indirectly on the bitcoin wave anyways. Bitcoin has such a huge market cap that it will affect your portfolio regardless.

No reason why you couldn't add bitcoin into the mix. But it goes in the "last 30 percent" of the portfolio. In my opinion Bitcoin (in its current form) is as risky as some of the small-caps.

 

Or you could just use "Delta" on your phone....

 

Is it too late to join the party (in your opinion)?
How do you withdraw the hard cash?

 

Withdrawing the cash is easy from coinspot.

I don't think its too late, but you never know! Just make sure you only put in what you can afford to lose and you'll be fine.

 

Thanks so much for the time and effort you've put in here (I really wish it had been available early last week - it would have saved me a lot of research, and analysis paralysis). You've made it easy to understand, and simple to follow.

 

There's a lot of noise at the moment with banks restricting cash deposits into exchanges.

Apparently a lot of accounts having fraud blocks put on them or just flat out refusal to allow the transfer.

Making it very hard to get fiat into exchanges.

 

I think Coinspot is too expensive.
If you want a dabble and have had experience in buying and selling shares, then I'd suggest BTCmarkets (BTC Markets - Buy Bitcoins | Bitcoin Exchange) or Indepenent Reserve (https://www.independentreserve.com)
The interfaces are not too different to that used for buying and selling shares on Comsec, ANZ, etc.
If you want to try other exotic cryptocurrencies, you can do so in an easy fashion by exchanging bitcoin, ether, etc that you buy on local those local exchanges (but at a higher fee) via Shapeshift (ShapeShift | Cryptocurrency Exchange | Simple Coin Conversion) or Changelly (https://changelly.com). However make sure that you have a wallet and address for the cryptocurrency that you want to change to,
The lower fee, more advanced option is to buy ether at one of the exchanges above and exchange it for the Crypto that you want at Binance (https://www.binance.com) or Bittrex (https://bittrex.com). Binance has the cheapest fees, that get even cheaper if you use their token BNB to pay the fee.

 

+1 for BTC

 

Also you will want a wallet to store your crypto. Keeping crypto on exchanges is generally not safe.
I think that Exodus (https://www.exodus.io) is a good place to start.
It stores many of the major cryptocurrencies and it also has the Shapeshift exchange built in if you want to try exchanging between cryptos in the controlled environment of the wallet.
I find also handy that you can set it to show the AUD equivalent of each amount (balance and transaction) - personally the tiny decimals I find hard to process in my brain, the AUD equivalent is much easier

 

I'd like to know why you're bullish on BTC? Serious question. Reasons I ask:

1. BTC is legacy technology. It's been around for years (yeah I know the price has only really gone up in the past ~2months or so). Most, if not all, things in IT that old are bound to either get replaced or superseded. How long this takes, is anyone's guess, especially in the crypto world where prices drop like a dud and go up like a rocket at the drop of a hat. Moreso in the case of BTC, where the engineers cant make changes to the actual tech, but create forks, which has resulted in the surge of Bcash, BTG etc
2. Transactions can take days to confirm given how high network congestion is. There was a legit picture of 210,000 pending transactions on reddit the other day.
3. BTC processes 6 transactions per second, Visa on the other hand does 60,000 per second. Think about these numbers for a moment. I know BTC is supposed to be unhackable, secure, decentralized system and all whereas Visa is a company with centralized payments and all. But still, the numbers are staggering.
4. The fork for B2X happened some hours ago but BTC's price didn't surge. Is this a sign of waning interest in the masses?

Finally, the above is not to say people shouldn't chuck $$ into crypto. I'm all for new technology and I too have some BTC on me as well as several other coins, XRP being the most notable (and this is what I am bullish on). I'd just like to know why you think BTC will still keep going up in value. I hope it does! I hope it hits $100k USD. Then my initial investment of $1100 into BTC will be worth $20k

 

Hi Westie
In simple terms, the graph is a long term up trend with a temporary down trend and I think it will remain an uptrend for some time.

I agree it’s not the best cryptocurrency but people have not really started using them for their intended use in meaningful quantities yet for us to draw a conclusion on what actually works better.

I do buy small amounts BTC where I can - and a small amount of etherium, and also have bitcoin cash due to the fork but I did not buy it.

However most of what I have has been created in mining or earning not purchased

I do not treat it like shares, don’t trade or sell at highs etc, I keep it, I’m not worried about the current price and just use it like money

I’m not really concerned about the current price of latest drama - it crashed and burned and died 7 times in 2017 - people create emotional drama around short term trends but no one (myself included) really know what the future holds.

I can’t seem to run businesses with the other coins at this stage and this is another reason I’m so bullish on BTC. This may change in future when people get over the dot com bubble behaviour and start using cryptocurrencies as intended.

I’m not into the entire speculative ico coin thing - I don’t have time and at this stage also have no interest, I do look at things people suggest however.

The technology is revolutionary and life changing and that’s what interests me the most - I’m stepping up the education around this in the next month, doing a lot of studying on it including another uni degree

The internet was also revolutionary and life changing and allowed us to build businesses larger than what was possible without it. My company would not be able to manage 300 properties without online systems and this is only one tiny industry. Lots of money was made.

At the beginning google was unable to scale, crashed when photos were introduced, unable to handle videos but it failed forward because it was required to. Bitcoin is like google and has too much reach not to succeed but that is just my own speculation not a fact

Great technologies, great ideas and great people fail forward

I mainly (with few exceptions to support friends) keep out of icos and other coins, not to say that they may not succeed in future - I’m sure some will, my speculation is that most will be traded at some stage for bitcon or ether. People are buying them to sell at a high not buying them to use as currency and current behaviour is that when they are traded, they are not always traded for fiat currency but for the more proven cryptocurrencies bitcoin or etherium.

I see it as an industry not investments and if we draw anything from similarities of the initial internet stages, people who were speculating on whether their yahoo shares were better than toys r us shares actually missed the whole point of what the internet was about, not to mention lost a lot of money too.

Use it, mine it, earn it, but keep the investment in it to a minimal. People WILL lose money in cryptocurrencies and sadly will then blame cryptocurrencies instead of their own shortsightedness of what this is all about