The definitive guide to buying cryptocurrency

From start to finish, the definitive guide to buying any cryptocurrency is here. I want people to be able to get into cryptocurrency easily without having to do crazy amounts of reading, so I will try to keep this as short as possible.

You need to find an exchange that accepts “fiat” money (USD, EUR, etc) and will allow you to exchange it for either Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH). This will always be step 1, no matter what cryptocurrency you are buying. I will list some common, trusted fiat exchanges below in no particular order for you to look at:

Note: I will only be listing exchanges that sell both Ether and Bitcoin to give you the most freedom.

Well, that’s basically it for the major ones serving the most people with the most payment options. Yes, it’s not very many! I will list some alternatives below which may be applicable to some people, they may have low limits, long entry times, not serving wide arrays of countries etc:

Yes, you need to buy Bitcoin or Ether even if you are looking to buy another cryptocurrency. I know, sounds counter-intuitive but just keep going through the tutorial.

Put as much Euro/Dollars into Bitcoin/Ether as you wish to put into your other cryptocurrency of choice.

Which one should you buy? It’s up to you. Bitcoin is more direct as most websites deal in BTC pairs, which means you can only trade from BTC direct to another currency. Bitcoin however is quite slow when sending from one place to another. Ether is much, much faster when sending from one place to another but on many exchanges may need to be sold for Bitcoin on the exchange first in order to trade for another cryptocurrency. Personally I recommend Ether since it’s a lot faster to move between exchanges.

If you are just looking to buy Bitcoin or Ether, congratulations, you’re pretty much finished! Move onto Step 4!

Most fiat exchanges do not allow you to buy anything other than Bitcoin or Ether. Therefore you need to choose another exchange which usually only deals in cryptocurrency, to trade your Bitcoin or Ether for the cryptocurrency you want to buy. Not all exchanges offer all cryptocurrencies, so you’ll have to go onto the individual exchanges to ensure that they offer what you want.

Either way, here is a list of commonly used cryptocurrency exchanges with a wide offering of cryptocurrencies:

So these are all of the major exchanges which allow you to trade Bitcoin for other cryptocurrencies. Some of these also allow you to trade Ether for other currencies. However, you can always send Ether to all of these exchanges and benefit from the fast transfer times of Ether and then trade the Ether for Bitcoin on the exchange in order to trade for something else.

Finally, there are a couple of other automated cryptocurrency exchange options which essentially do all of the work for you in exchanging one cryptocurrency for another but may not offer as good of a deal. How they work is you pick which cryptocurrency you want to send and which you want to receive in return, it’ll generate a transaction for you, once you fulfill the transaction then it’ll return the new cryptocurrency to a wallet you specify. These websites will always tell you what you should receive before you make the transaction and it will lock in the price. The following are services that offer this:

The last and most important step of all of this is to get your cryptocurrency off of the exchange and into a wallet that you control personally. This is extremely important. Exchanges are often hacked and all of your funds can be lost without any hope of repatriation.

It may seem like a lot of effort getting started with buying cryptocurrencies but once you’ve become familiar with how all of this works, you’ll find it pretty much effortless to work with.

Like anything there is a learning curve.

Since you’ve read this far into my post, here’s an investment tip. Cryptocurrencies that do not exist on a fiat exchange yet are more difficult for the average person to buy in large quantities and thus the price is most likely lower as a result of this. If you expect a cryptocurrency will be added to a fiat exchange, you should expect an increase in price as it is more accessible. Keep in mind however that most cryptocurrencies never get added to fiat exchanges and that doesn’t look like it’ll change any time soon.

With that, I’ll close off this blog post. I hope that you were successful in your investment and welcome to the world of cryptocurrencies.

Related posts:

My baby turns 1 in just a few short day! Time has literally flown, as it seems now. To be honest, there were days when I just couldn’t wait for the minutes to creep by. Boy oh boy, what an adventure…

We decided that we could both meet at Atlantic Terminal Mall, this Saturday at 2pm. You’re supposed to pick a public place — and give some sort of physical description of yourself so they can easily…

It was not long ago when we had to look for information inside of encyclopedias and worked our way through multiple pages just to find the exact information we needed on a subject. Fast forward to…