One noob’s intro to cryptocurrency. AKA: At my age, I shouldn’t be such a dumb ass.

I, like so so many others right now, have decided to throw my hat into the cryptocurrency ring. Personally, I am very disgusted with myself on this topic. I should be retired now, but I really dropped the ball on this one. I have known about Bitcoin since the beginning, but I never researched it and realized what it actually is. I just thought it was some kind of online currency, whereby you did not need to deal with a bank or predatory Paypal fees. I thought 1 Bitcoin = $1. Lol.

Needless to say, I am playing a whole lot of catch up right now, and I am constantly feeling that I am a week late to the party. Hopefully I will look back on this time and laugh at my nearsightedness. Regardless, there is huge opportunity in this market to make money. However, I have run into a bunch of snags in the last two weeks. Hopefully I can spare someone from the same pitfalls that I have encountered.

The first thing I did once I kind of got a loose handle on things, was to watch the price of Bitcoin. I had already realized that the real money was to be made in altcoins, but you still need bitcoin to buy them. So I waited patiently for Bitcoin prices to go down so I could buy. Well, I woke up last Sunday and saw that Bitcoin had dropped to around 13k. I thought, “awesome! Let me just wait and see if it drops lower”. Dumbass! I have a kid that is 21 months and full of piss and vinegar. By the time I got back in the game, so to speak, it was back to $1600+. I thought. “it’s got to go back down at some point”. Sometime the next day I kind of figured that, since so many people are now turned on to this, that this these prices are likely to be the new normal. In a fit of “fuck it!”, I decided to but some bitcoin at around 17k. Granted, I am only buying $100 worth, but I know this it is still dumb to buy while it is so high.

So now I have $100 worth of BTC. Not quite. Coinbase took a little chunk, so I have like $96 worth of BTC. Fine, let’s go trade. Oh wait, my Bittrex.com account wants ID verification. Ok, so I type in some info, including my SS#, and I get a response that my public records can’t be confirmed and I must now do the enhanced verification. It took me 2 full days of uploading 4 different photos/scans of my driver’s license and 4 different versions of a selfie, in different combinations, to get approved. I actually had to submit questions to their tech support to get it resolved. Fortunately, by the time I was a good to go and had squashed my insecurities and cowardice, bitcoin was actually going up in price. Kick ass!

Uh oh, turns out Coinbase needs to charge a network transfer fee. $14! $14 dollars out of my $100(sorry, $96)! Are you kidding me? So I started looking into ways to reduce this fee. I came across something that said you can lower your fees by moving bitcoin at night and the weekends. So I waited. I tried at 10 that night, Coinbase told me that it would $15 dollars…the fuck? Maybe these reduced fee times aren’t remotely close to eastern US time…so I waited some more. I woke up the next morning and checked. $16!!!! I pondered taking the hit. I already knew that I if I had taken the hit in the beginning and bought some Cardano, I would have come out at least even. I continued researching and realized that Coinbase was part of the GDAX exchange. Now all I had to do was get my enhanced verification dealt with there. Lol.

GDAX acted like we were old time pals because of my Coinbase account. I started the verification process and then was confronted by the fact that I could not upload a selfie, but needed to have a webcam. So I then had to go to my wife’s laptop. I went through the steps and they apologized that they could not process it because they were overwhelmed and that I should try again in 30 minutes. I did…same response. Sometime that evening, after multiple attempts, I was approved!

I had found a video that dealt with avoiding fees. The thing that was most valuable from that video was learning that GDAX is tied in with Coinbase. What I did was, once approved, transfer my $96 of BTC to GDAX. I then bought Litecoin with all of it. Then I transferred the Litecoin back to Coinbase and was able to then transfer it to Bittrex.com for a whopping fee of 7 cents.

So that’s largely a win for me, albeit a pretty sad one. In the middle of all these transfers, and dealing with my hellion of a child, I decided I would buy $100 more of Litecoin because, while only $270, it was going up rapidly. I had finally gotten my checking account number all verified and what not with Coinbase. I did this because the fee they charge for using checking account info, as opposed to debit card info, is quite a bit less. So I bought $100 worth of Litecoin at $270ish with my checking account. Ruh roh! This transfer is going to take 7 days. Maybe if my kid wasn’t screaming or trying to kill himself by doing god knows what, I would have read this a little closer and thought about it for a second. I didn’t. So now I have a buy order coming through that may or may not be at a good price when it finally processes. It would be nice to look this up to know, but then again, my situation is kind of what dictated this predicament in the first place.

The long and the short of all of this is that you can really get bogged down with unknown bullshit if you aren’t careful. Even if you do a bunch of research, you can still be surprised and caught off guard. Through this, I learned that you might think you are screwed, but if you tackle the problem from a different perspective, you just might come out ahead…or at least not completely screwed.

My tips:

1. If you want to go the Coinbase route, get your checking account all set up with Coinbase and transfer money into your USD wallet there first.
2. Use that money to buy Litecoin when the market is good.
3. Transfer that Litecoin to the exchange of your choice.
4. Sell the Litecoin for Bitcoin if the market is favorable.
5. Buy whatever you want.