This is my first Steemit post. I will educate new crypto users on how to get started in the market, and understand the 4 categories of the ecosystem within Bitcoin, and other Crypto Currencies.
The current hype around Crypto Currency is making waves of new comers that want to learn the basic of crypto currency, and where they should start. This guide is created to give the overview of the four main aspects of Crypto Currencies, and what you can do to participate in the ecosystem.
The Four Categories of Crypto Currency
- Investing Money and Holding Coins
- Trading on the markets
- Mining and node operations
- Jobs and Business use-cases
These categories allow you to participate in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Now, you should decide where to begin to start learning from these four categories. Let’s discuss more in-depth of the four categories below:
- Investing Money and Holding Coins
This requires you to buy coins using your local currency (IE USD: I want to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin using Coinbase.com). This is where you turn $$$ into Coins. Once you purchased the coins on Coinbase, what do you do next? You must prepare to secure your coins. We wrote a recommended wallet that will safely secure your coins offline to protect against hackers. When your coins are stored online on any website or computer, you run the risk of getting those coins hacked.
Read our guide here to learn how to secure your crypto currencies: https://medium.com/@blockolo/review-ledger-wallet-ledger-blue-hardware-product-d11e77ebd25d
Trading on the Markets High Risk
Once you physically have coins (for example: Bitcoin) to trade on the markets against other crypto currencies, you can start by learning about different currency markets at http://www.CoinMarketCap.com — This site provides updated information about the coins, supply, markets, and prices. The most popular trading exchanges are: Poloniex.com, Bittrex.com, and GDAX.com — These trading markets allow you to trade Bitcoins for other currencies. However, we highly recommend you avoid trading right away. Give yourself a good couple of months to learn the basics of crypto currency and securing your coins.Mining and node operations
Mining is an expensive component. You must buy expensive hardware (to mine Bitcoin) costs can be upwards of $50,000 for a Bitcoin miner. We recommend starting slow and easy, mining Ethereum or XMR. You need to learn what type of mining you want to do. CPU or GPU mining. CPU mining isn’t as powerful compared to the Graphic Cards you can buy on the market that deliver performance. We recommend mining calculators (Here: https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator) to figure out how your computer parts can perform in mining.
You can use an easy software miner from MinerGate (our referral link: https://minergate.com/a/f440e2feabc64b31ca5395d3). I have used them for my computers, both old and new, and it is easy (plug-in-play); however, it isn't the best mining operation in terms of payouts and rewards. I recommend you do more research on mining pools, fees, and mining hardware to calculate your earnings properly.
You can also be a node operator on Dash, ZenCash, ZCoin, and a few more. We recommend you learn the differences of mining and node operations, because they are similar in concept to secure the network; however, they are independent in the process.
- Jobs and Business Use-Cases
People can earn crypto currency by simply accepting it as a payment method. Think of the job you currently have, or want to have, think about accepting Bitcoin as a payment. If you run a website or business right now, or want to create one in the crypto currency space, think about how you can accept payments in bitcoin or other currencies. This will allow you to earn coins as payments for goods and services.
There is opportunity to earn crypto currency without physically investing cash money. These four categories still require you to research, and understand fully before diving deep into crypto currency.
Your next step is to take this information and start on the area you want to learn the most. Bookmark this page, and remember to visit it to keep you on track of discovering more of getting started in the space. I also recommend you read the Original White Paper of Bitcoin to understand the value of Bitcoin and Crypto Currencies: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
This post is created by team Blockolo, a marketing department for Crypto Currency Businesses.
Thank you for reading,
-AJ T
www.Blockolo.com
Very nice intro post! You didn't bog it down with jargon or go over the heads of newcomers with smart contracts and tokens which is great.
My 2 cents is to actually read the bitcoin paper, it's only like 9 pages. Or conversely wikipedia some pages like blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, and message signing and hashing. I know I said a lot but these concepts are core to the btc protocol
Thanks for the feedback! I am always open to hearing from others about the type of article, and what thoughts they have to improve the growth for our community. The people will rise, and it is our responsibility to assist them through it all!