Posted by Patrick Moreau on July 9, 2019 in Finance
Cryptocurrency is a current days El Dorado, a market that offers huge profit making opportunities. But it’s also extremely risky so before you jump in it’s better to be informed. Here are a few advices if you want to buy cryptocurrency online in 2019. To start investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies you first need to with an exchange which will offer you to buy cryptocurrency with money. An exchange is basically an website that offers everyone to buy and sell Bitcoin as well as any other cryptocurrency that they have listed.
Signing up for a Coinbase account is easy, though you will need to provide some form of identification. That may involve sending a copy of your photo ID and potentially also sending a live image of your face using a webcam. These rules are important to follow as they allow the site(s) to comply with ‘know-your-customer’ regulations. Although Coinbase alone will allow you to buy and sell Bitcoin, it’s also worth signing up to its linked exchange platform, Coinbase Pro, which will give you greater control over your purchases.
FOMO is an abbreviation for the fear of missing out. This is one of the most notorious reasons as to why many traders fail in the art. From an outside point of view, it is never a good scene seeing people make massive profits within minutes from pumped-up coins. Honestly, I never like such situations any more than you do. But I’ll tell you one thing that’s for sure, Beware of that moment when the green candles seem to be screaming at you and telling to you to jump in. It is at this point that the whales I mentioned earlier will be smiling and watching you buy the coins they bought earlier at very low prices. Guess what normally follows? These coins usually end up in the hands of small traders and the next thing that happens is for the red candles to start popping up due to an oversupply and, voila, losses start trickling in.
If you’re beginning, you’re likely eager to trade. I get it, really. But don’t rush it. Take a little bit of time to develop a basic cryptocurrency trading strategy and to educate yourself. Do you know the basics of blockchain technology and Bitcoin? Do you know what circulating vs total supply means? Do you understand what inflation is? Do you know about exchanges, wallets, private keys, and public keys? If you can’t answer these basic questions, you’ll be in trouble quick enough. Take some time to prepare yourself, it’s essential.
Figure out if you want to go for longterm trades or short term trades. Are you going for short term trades with every penny you have to invest, or are you going to go for the long term with some and trading short term with some? Long-term investors will pay a lower tax rate if they can hold for over 12 months, but as a trade-off, they WILL have to sit through corrections (likely seeing their balance go down 50% plus on paper as often as they see it go up). Short-term investors can avoid corrections if they are nimble, but they’ll owe taxes on the profits from each trade they do along the way (see: how taxes work with cryptocurrency to understand how the long term and short term capital gains tax work with cryptocurrency).
The cryptocurrencies work like this: They are generated by the network in most cases to encourage peers, also known as nodes and miners, to work to secure the network and verify entries or transactions. Each network has a unique way of generating and distributing them among its peers. Bitcoin, for example, rewards its peers (miners) for “solving the next block”. A block is a group or entries with all transactions. The solution is to find a hash that connects the new block with the old one. From here comes the term chain of blocks. The block is the group of entries and the string is the hash. Hashes are a type of cryptographic puzzle. Think of them as Sudoku puzzles that the classmates compete to connect the blocks. See more details on How To Buy Cryptocurrencies Safely.