Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies. Peter Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ of exchanges and get to know other places where you can go cryptocurrency shopping.

      Communities

      

Getting to know the crypto community can be the next step as you’re finding your way in the market. The web has plenty of chat rooms and support groups to give you a sense of the market and what people are talking about. Here are some ways to get involved:

       Crypto-specific Telegram groups. Many cryptocurrencies have their very own channels on the Telegram app. To join them, you first need to download the Telegram app on your smartphone or computer; it’s available for iOS and Android.

       Crypto chat rooms on BitcoinTalk or Reddit: BitcoinTalk (https://bitcointalk.org/) and Reddit (www.reddit.com/) have some of the oldest crypto chat rooms around. You can view some topics without signing up, but if you want to get involved, you need to log in. (Of course, Reddit isn’t exclusive to cryptos, but you can search for a variety of cryptocurrency topics.)

       TradingView chat room: One of the best trading platforms out there, TradingView (www.tradingview.com/) also has a social service where traders and investors of all sorts come together and share their thoughts, questions, and ideas.

       Invest Diva’s Premium Investing Group: If you’re looking for a less crowded and more investment/trading-focused place to get support, you can join Kiana’s investment group (and chat directly with her as a perk) at https://learn.investdiva.com/join-group.

      

On the flip side, many scammers also target these kinds of platforms to advertise and lure members into trouble. Keep your wits about you.

Making a Plan Before You Jump In

      If you’re interested in cryptocurrency investing, you may just want to buy some cryptocurrencies and save them for their potential growth in the future. Or you may want to become more of an active investor and buy or sell cryptocurrencies more regularly to maximize profit and revenue. As discussed in Book 5, Chapter 4, you can select cryptocurrencies based on factors like category, popularity, ideology, the management behind the blockchain, and its economic model.

      Even if your transaction is a one-time event and you don’t want to hear anything about your crypto assets for the next ten years, you still must gain the knowledge necessary to make the following decisions:

       What to buy

       When to buy

       How much to buy

       When to sell

      

If you’re not fully ready to buy cryptocurrencies, no worries. You can try some of the alternatives to cryptos: initial coin offerings and stocks (see Book 5) or mining (see Book 6). To learn more about two well-known cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin and Ether — before investing in either one, head to Books 3 and 4, respectively.

      Over 5,000 cryptocurrencies are out there at the time of writing, and the number is growing. Some of these cryptos may vanish in five years. Others may explode to over 1,000 percent of their present value and may even replace traditional cash. Chapter 4 of this minibook covers all different types of cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Stellar Lumens.

      

Because the crypto industry is pretty new, it’s still very hard to identify the best-performing cryptos for long-term investments. That’s why you may benefit from diversifying among various types and categories of cryptocurrencies in order to manage your risk. By diversifying across 15 or more cryptos, you can stack up the odds of having winners in your portfolio. On the flip side, overdiversification can become problematic as well, so you need to take calculated measures. Flip to Book 5, Chapter 5 for more on diversification.

      

When you’ve narrowed down the cryptocurrencies you like, you must then identify the best time to buy them. In 2017, many people started to believe in the idea of Bitcoin and wanted to get involved. Unfortunately, many of those people mismanaged the timing and bought when the price had peaked. They had to settle for buying fewer bits of Bitcoin (pun intended) and also had to sit on their losses and wait for the next price surge.

Chapter 2

      How Cryptocurrencies Work

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Understanding the basics of how cryptocurrencies function

      

Deciphering important terminology you need to know before investing

      

Seeing how new cryptocurrencies are born from old ones with forks

      Cryptocurrencies, and more specifically Bitcoin, have been one of the first use cases for blockchain technology (covered in detail in Book 2). That’s why most people may have heard about Bitcoin more than they have about the underlying blockchain technology.

      This chapter gets into more detail about how cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, how they operate, and how they’re generated, as well as some crypto geek terms you can impress your dates with.

Explaining Basic Terms in the Cryptocurrency Process

      Cryptocurrencies are also known as digital coins, but they’re quite different from the coins in your piggy bank. For one thing, they aren’t attached to a central bank, a country, or a regulatory body.

Here’s an example. Say you want to buy the latest version of Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies from your local bookstore. Using your normal debit card, this is what happens:

      1 You give your card details to the cashier or the store’s point-of-sale system.

      2 The store runs the СКАЧАТЬ