How to Get into Cryptocurrencies, a primer for beginners.

How to get started?

Have you seen the change in price lately?, the volatility, it has many reasons to be, most people agree that the recent lows have been due to the South Korean authorities raiding the exchanges and threatening the executives with jail, regulation scares the investors away, at least temporarily.

Others are quick to point out this is something that happens every year, a dip in January.

Bitcoin and the other cryptos can be intimidating, at first glance it looks like a scam, like someone smarter than you is trying to trick you into sending your real money USD and exchange them for meme pictures on the phone.

There are many real life facts that will raise red flags on some people and prevent them from even looking into it for example the currency "bitconnect" closed their operations, and all the social media accounts, went from $400 to $30 TODAY, many investors to the tune of thousands of dollars lost all their money in seconds and will not be able to get it back from bitconnect.

The signs were out there:

For anybody willing to put the time into it, the information was available, first of all, Bitconnect used the main page to promote ridiculous profits it still reads "The moment you acquire BitConnect Coin it becomes an interest bearing asset with Up to 120% return per year through PoS minting. All you have to do to earn with this method is to hold coins in your Bitconnect -QT wallet"

Proof of stake is a system that at its core is intended to replace bitcoin's "proof of work" (mining) , by using proof of stake the people who get new coins is the people who hold the coins in their wallets, not the miners, they sell this as saving electricity cause you don't need to buy the mining equipment and pay for the electricity but you are also not getting the security that bitcoin's proof of work has demonstrated for 10 years now.

Developers and users were racing concerns about this currency since it came out, sadly this is one of the stories that end badly, but nobody should let a few scammer scare you away of taking new chances, risk can be minimized.

How to get into the cryptocurrencies with manageable risk:

Don't invest anything you are not willing to lose, don't count on the gains cause everything changes really fast!!!!!!

-Research what you are investing on, forums like https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/ have information on almost all the coins, the discussion involves all the very new people and the oldest of seniors in the community, and you can find many passionate posts explaining almost any crypto related topic in detail there

If you are looking for short term gains, you are better off investing on a coin that has low value per unit but high marketcap, on this site the coins are arranged by marketcap (amount of money invested in them), if bitcoin market cap doubles and the price doubles your investment you will see a little increase, if on the other hand you buy a coin that is worth $0.0001 per unit, you can buy many units, if the price goes to $1 then you have much more profit in the same time frame, bitcoin cash is the coin to hold long term, holding cryptocurrency long term is called "to Hodl"

-Don't get scared away by the "FUD" (fear uncertainty and doubt) but also don't ignore it!!! While some criticism may come from people who don't know, being aware of the communities opinion on a project and how many people actually use it can prevent situations like the one from bitconnect.

-Always look for the rewards and platforms that can give you coins for your time or attention, those dont need you to enter your own money and can provide enough to grow your coin portfolio some examples are Steemit.com which pays for likes on your posts, https://d.tube/ which pays for the views on your videos, https://dsound.audio which pays for the likes on the music you upload and https://steemit.com/dlive/@haja/dlive which pays for the likes on your live broadcasts, among many others

Any buying suggestions?

-For now the recommended strategy is to buy while the prices are low, you can buy $1 worth of some cheap coin and wait for about a year, most coins whose value per unit is bellow $1 that are listed on https://coinmarketcap.com/ first 100 places by "market cap" can be reasonably expected to go up, even if the project is a bad one, you can put a little money on the projects you believe in the most, while saving the large investments on a more stable coin like bitcoin cash.

The dare devils among us will dare to put over $100 on some small coins, and they may lose it all overnight, but if the coin they picked when small goes up, the way Dogecoin, NEM and ripple did in 2017, these fearless investors are the ones who will be able to profit the most.