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Topic: Getting started with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (Read 1856 times)

jr. member
Activity: 130
Merit: 1
With the crypto market making moves again, it might be wise to revive a few of these topics on how to get started.

I remember when I started out with BTC, i ran into a lot of issues. From wallets, block confirmations, private keys and all the beginner mistakes one can make.
Heck, I even was highly nervous purchasing my first Bitcoins, just because i wasn't sure about the source.

Anyone who is a beginner, make sure to stick to bigger platforms, to reduce the risk. Use wallets that are easy but secure, and make sure you understand the difference between private and public keys!

here's a short guide on how to get started: https://pokerceo.io/crypto/how-to-invest-in-cryptocurrency-like-a-shark/
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1029
Are you looking for some free cryptos?

There is a NEM airdrop going on for people who sign up for WeChat and add the NEM wallet extension.

If you have a cell phone, follow the instructions on this video. Be especially careful about keeping your passwords and private keys safe and accessible to you as there is no way to recover them.

I'm not sure how long the airdrop will last, so don't wait too long!
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1029
I deleted two identical posts from two different users because they appear to be spam. Everyone is welcome to learn and ask questions, but let's keep our posts original. Thanks Smiley
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1029
Tip #9: Know what makes a good altcoin

This morning I read this article describing what you absolutely never want to do: mortgage your home to buy Bitcoin. Please, don't ever do something like that. Earlier this year I sold off some NEM I was holding (at a much lower price than it is now) and used the proceeds to pay off some crippling credit card debt we'd gotten into years ago. Even though today I could have gotten four times as much for the coins I consider it to be a good decision. The added peace of mind getting out from under that debt has added to my family has been priceless. My point is you want to use your cryptocurrency venture to reduce your debt, not add to it. You certainly don't want to place your home at risk for the sake of a coin that may be entering into a bubble phase in terms of its price.

Looking at Bitcoin's current price, it's certainly possible that you missed the Bitcoin train, and that's OK. There are still plenty of great opportunities with altcoins. Not all altcoins are created equally, so it's important to know how to distinguish between the ones likely to succeed and the ones likely to fail. No one can know the future for sure, but there are definitely characteristics that make success more likely. Today I'm going to list some of them, then flesh them out further in subsequent posts.

A good altcoin needs to have most, preferably all, of these characteristics.

1. A solid business plan
2. Value added infrastructure beyond the coin
3. A solid and professional development team
4. A solid community
5. Good communication from the development team
6. A strong incentive to keep coins off the market
7. Systematic buy support for the coin on the market

I will flesh out each one of these further in subsequent posts. If you've done your previous "homework," you have probably already encountered a few altcoins that look really interesting to you. Try going back through their information and communication channels and see if you can spot the presence or lack of these characteristics.

Even when you believe you have found a winning altcoin to invest in, please only invest what you can afford to lose.
newbie
Activity: 56
Merit: 0
Thanks for the tip @ Sir Wiser! I'm glad that I bump into your thread, I've learned a lot of things in just a short period of time. This will help a lot of newbies like me, that this site isn't just any other forum to which accounts are useless.
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1029
This is a good tip indeed, password manager is an extremely useful thing to have. Even for the internet in general. Any other tips you can provide? I want to start making money with cryptocurrency myself, but first need to learn as much as I can. Investing without knowing the basics will probably get me nowhere)


Be sure to read all the tips provided here. I keep adding more once or twice a week.
member
Activity: 700
Merit: 12
Really you are giving good updates to the people who don't have proper knowledge about what is happening around the crypto world. Newbie like me will go through all your updates and acquire some knowledge about the what is happening.
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1029
I'm having a bit of an internal debate as to what should be my next tip. I could flesh out further what to look for in an altcoin that you're considering buying or otherwise acquiring, or I could go more in the direction of how to earn your way into cryptocoins (yes, there are better ways to earn cryptos than faucets!).

I'll eventually cover both topics; it's a matter of in what order. So, those of you following this thread, what would you like to see next?

In the mean time, I have quite the roundup of interesting cryptocurrency related articles for your education and enjoyment.

How normal people get involved in cryptocurrency. This article is a list of the many different ways to catch the crypto-bug. There really is no one size fits all. Everyone's story is going to be unique.

Bitcoin 2017: a year in review. This was quite a year for Bitcoin. This infographic gives you a great snapshot of how much things have changed in just one year.

Will the futures market do to Bitcoin what it did to gold? Today Bitcoin futures enter the scene. In a nutshell, all the Bitcoin naysayers can now put their money where their mouth is and bet against it. How will that affect the price of Bitcoin?

CryptoKitties takes the Ethereum network by storm. You have to put real money into this, but what a fun way to learn about the block chain technology, smart contracts, and what it takes to run a decentralized app. I think if you wanted to play this game, you could count the cost as tuition in your crypto-education journey. Just use some common sense. Allocate a certain amount to this and stick with it, and only put in what you can afford to lose. Most of all, have fun Smiley
newbie
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
I'm taking a little break from sharing tips because I had some things come up in my life this past week that required more intense attention. However, I'm hoping to keep going with it by the middle of the week.

In the mean time, I came across this very well written nontechnical piece explaining what cryptocurrencies actually are, why they are valuable, and why they might not be valuable down the road. It's a very balanced, realistic view. I learned a lot from reading it, and I'm not exactly a newbie. It's a great article, one everyone involved in this industry should keep in their virtual library.

https://blog.chain.com/a-letter-to-jamie-dimon-de89d417cb80



Thank you very much for your very informative and great post! I read through it and I feel like I've learned a lot, but of course there is still a lot to go. I also read the article you linked and it was most certainly the best explanation of cryptocurrencies that I've read so far, so thank you very much for that too!
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1029
Tip #8: Organize your forums and other communication platforms

This one is actually huge. If you did your homework and actually researched a few altcoins you have surely discovered as many new forums as the number of altcoins you studied. Some coins have multiple forums and several other means of communication.

As a case in point, take the coins in my portfolio. I currently hold NEM, DNotes, DMD Diamond, STEEM and VIVA. I've got dust in a few other coins, but those are the main ones. So NEM, DNotes, and DMD Diamond each have threads on this forum and I follow them. NEM, VIVA and DNotes also have their own forums, although the forum I'm referring to for DNotes is not exclusively dedicated to DNotes. STEEM has its own entire social media site and within that site you can follow the important people involved in STEEM development for news and discussion. In addition to all that, NEM has its own Telegram channel (which I used to be part of), DMD Diamond has its own Slack channel, STEEM has at least one chat group on Rocket Chat and VIVA has a presence on Basecamp and Discord.

You see how it works?

When it comes to getting involved in the cryptocurrency industry, communication channels multiply at an alarming rate.

And when you invest in a particular altcoin, it is very important that you keep up with that coin's news and other communication, which means you have to very regularly catch up on its thread here, its own forum, and its various relevant chat groups. In other words you'll be doing a lot of reading and interacting. If you don't, you could miss some very important information affecting your holdings. Case in point. One of the other coins I hold that I didn't mention above is FIMK. FIMK also has its own thread here, its own forum, and who knows what else. I unfortunately ignored the FIMK channels but continued to hold the coin. And then one day it was announced that the development energy was going to shift to this coin called HEAT. I could be wrong but I believe during a certain window of time you could exchange your FIMK for HEAT on a one to one basis. I wasn't paying attention and missed that window. The last time I checked HEAT was worth a lot and FIMK was practically worthless. And you could trade 200 FIMK for one HEAT, or something like that. So because I wasn't paying attention rather than holding a winner, I'm now bagholding a loser which is not likely to ever go anywhere, though the development team supposedly is still working on it.

With the above said, I will say that any coin that you have to monitor very intensely is likely to wind up being a loser. However, when you've acquired large amounts of a coin at cost, you don't want to take chances, especially at the beginning, so you need to be keeping tabs on its news. When the coin has proven itself to be stable in the news department, then you might be able to relax the intensity a bit, but you never want to stop monitoring it altogether.

Since for every coin you hold you're going to be following around three to five communication channels, you need to keep them organized. You can use bookmarks in your browser, a list with hyperlinks in a spreadsheet or word document. There might even be an app for keeping track of such things.

The bottom line: come up with a system that works for you for keeping all those channels straight and ensuring that you will visit them regularly and make it happen.
member
Activity: 76
Merit: 12
Does anyone know of a website that can help to start this whole bitcoin? From the setup and stuff?


This is that website, especially this beginner section! With regards to set up, the wallet thread stacked at the top of this section is a good place to start!
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
Does anyone know of a website that can help to start this whole bitcoin? From the setup and stuff?
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1029
I'm taking a little break from sharing tips because I had some things come up in my life this past week that required more intense attention. However, I'm hoping to keep going with it by the middle of the week.

In the mean time, I came across this very well written nontechnical piece explaining what cryptocurrencies actually are, why they are valuable, and why they might not be valuable down the road. It's a very balanced, realistic view. I learned a lot from reading it, and I'm not exactly a newbie. It's a great article, one everyone involved in this industry should keep in their virtual library.

https://blog.chain.com/a-letter-to-jamie-dimon-de89d417cb80
sr. member
Activity: 654
Merit: 250
Yes I agree that Bitcointalk account is an asset.

I recommend Waves because you do not have to spend huge sums of money like ETH or BTC. In addition, I prosper all the time and it seems to me that it will mean a lot in the future.
jr. member
Activity: 161
Merit: 2
Thanks for this article. It is really helpful to me. Will try your step by step guide. Hope you can have more of these. Thanks again.
newbie
Activity: 80
Merit: 0
I've been involved in this industry for nearly five years and have been successful with it. In the interest of helping those new to the industry to also succeed I'm going to share a different "getting started" tip in this thread several times a week. I'll also update the top post as I add new tips.

Enjoy the steep learning curve. Do plenty of research and take responsibility to educate yourself, but be sure to also relax and have fun with it.

And now, the tips...

1. Get a good password manager.
2. Treat your BitcoinTalk ID as a valuable asset.
3. Register a Coinbase account.
4. Register a Free Bitcoin account.
5. Register a Moon Bitcoin account.
6. Start keeping records.
7. Understand there's more besides Bitcoin.

Wow. This is great. I'm new at cryptocurrency and Bitcoin so I will try this out. I'm outside US so coinbase might not be for me. Hope you can right more posts similar to this. Thanks.
newbie
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
@Wiser,

Really appreciate this post. I'm just getting started with Bitcoins/altcoins so this will help me out tremendously. Thanks.  Smiley
newbie
Activity: 18
Merit: 0
@ Wiser a BIG thank you for your contribution. I've been reading as much as I can during the day on and off on this site. Doing research with Google based upon what I've read here. I'm an "OLD" new guy and if there's one thing I've learned in life is education pays huge dividends. I'll continue to follow this thread as you update it and continue to educate myself. I'm really not interested into getting into trading but I am looking to invest a small amount of say $2000 or $3000. After 10 plus days of research and reading I'm slowly narrowing down a list while I wait for my Ledger Nano S to arrive which should be by the weekend.
member
Activity: 294
Merit: 10
www.daxico.com
Yes I agree that Bitcointalk account is an asset.
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1029
Tip #7: Understand there's more besides Bitcoin

This forum got started back when Bitcoin was pretty much the only game in town when it came to cryptocurrencies. To this day its focus is on Bitcoin. However, we are now almost done with 2017, Bitcoin has been around for eight years, and it has inspired lots of new coins and other cryptocurrency related projects.

You may be feeling overwhelmed by all the information you are encountering about Bitcoin. I remember feeling that way too. I kept seeing these ads for writing to earn a different coin, also known as an altcoin, and I ignored them for several months because I thought I should just focus on Bitcoin until I'd mastered it.

If you ignore the other coins you are going to miss out on a good 99 percent of what the cryptocurrency world has to offer, including a lot of ways to earn.

There are currently over seven hundred actively traded coins, and several thousand more defunct coins. It is very important to understand that there are more dead altcoins than live ones.

So at this stage, I am only going to advise that you get to know about some of the other altcoins. I am going to show you how to most easily get the information and your "homework" will be to get to know two or three altcoins. Just get to know them, but don't buy any yet. I will provide future tips on what to look for in an altcoin, but today I'm going to focus on how you can find the information you'll need to make an informed judgment about an altcoin before you buy it.

Coin Market Cap will be your go to site to connect with all the active altcoins. You can also use it to look up inactive coins as long as you know the exact name or ticker symbol of the coin. Go ahead and bookmark coinmarketcap dot com.

The home page is a list of the top one hundred coins in terms of market cap. Market cap is the total value in Dollars represented by all the coins currently in circulation multiplied by the current market price of the coin. Right now, the price of one Bitcoin is $9607.11 and there are 16,705,012 BTC in circulation. So the market cap for Bitcoin is $9607.11 x 16,705,012 = $160,486,887,835. It's a very simple math problem and a good way to rank coins. It is an inflated number for a couple reasons. First, this amount would be realized only if every single Bitcoin were to be sold at its current market price all at once. However, if everyone who owned Bitcoins tried to sell them, the price would drop and drop until the last person to unload would get next to nothing. Second, it doesn't account for any coins that are lost. We know from various anecdotes that a few people who mined Bitcoin early on wiped their hard drives or in some other way lost access to those coins and so they are not actually in circulation.

The rank of coins has nothing to do with the coin's quality, only its market cap. You can have a coin that is high quality but still has a low market cap. Diamond, for example, has a current circulating supply of 2,531,992 and a price of $9.66, so its market cap is $24,447,193. Because the supply is so low compared to Bitcoin, even if Diamond were priced at $10,000 each, its total coin market cap would still be lower than Bitcoin's. As for the coin's actual value, well, you need to know right now that a lot of very poor quality coins go through periods of rapid price rise due to hype, pump and dump schemes or random weird market forces, so you can't just consider the price or the market cap in making your investment decisions.

If you click on the name of a coin from the Coin Market Cap home page, it will take you to a page that is just for that coin. For example, click on Ethereum to get to its page. You will see a repeat of the information for Ethereum that you saw on the home page. On the left hand side, under the name "Ethereum," you will see a short list of hyperlinked words like "Website," "Announcement," "Explorer," and more. The Website hyperlink takes you straight to Ethereum's website. The Announcement hyperlink takes you straight to Ethereum's announcement thread on this forum. the Explorer hyperlinks (in the case of Ethereum there are several) take you to block explorers for Ethereum. Other hyperlinks take to you other sources of information about Ethereum, such as Ethereum's own forum or message board, Ethereum's chat channel and even Ethereum's source code. If you were interested in investing in Ethereum, you would first want to spend time looking over those different sites.

We're still on Ethereum's page. Scroll down a bit to where the charts are. That shows a graph of the overall price (in BTC and USD) and market cap trends over time. You can click on Markets to learn where Ethereum is traded, Social to get updated feeds of various social media sites where Ethereum has a presence, and Historical Data to find out the daily high, low, open and close price for Ethereum as far back as you want to go (default is 30 days).

I used Ethereum as an example, but the pages are laid out the same for each coin. Some coins may have slightly less information than Ethereum, but it will all be there.

So, for your "homework," spend some time on Coin Market Cap. Get familiar with the home page and the pages of a few individual coins. When selecting coins to learn more about, don't limit yourself to the top 100 ranked coins. You can easily ask to see the next 100 to get lower ranked coins. Once you've picked a few, then start digging into the hyperlinked information found on each of their pages. Feel free to post any summary information of what you've learned here.
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