Buying and Selling Cryptocurrencies

In March 2018, John Oliver said on HBO: “Cryptocurrencies are Everything You Don’t Understand about Money, Combined with Everything You Don’t Understand about Computers”.

The Context? That year, Bitcoin’s USD value went from $20,000 to $7,000 in less than a few weeks, bringing down the entire crypto market with it.

Two of the key issues for crypto are 1)understanding what they are used for and 2) what problems they seek to solve. Whether you are trading, investing, or just curious, here are some tips to follow BEFORE you spend a single penny in this universe:

• DYOR / Do Your Own Research: If a project sounds interesting to you, find out who the team behind it is, what they’ve done before, and if they exist in the real world (articles, conferences, videos, social media). Take the time to read the Whitepaper to find out how the governance of the project works and how the cryptos or tokens are distributed. You can find data and analysis for many NFT projects on our website.
• Don’t trust, verify: it is important not to solely rely on marketing when it comes to evaluating a project. Some announcements can be misleading and verifying the information received is essential.
• Don’t FOMO, don’t panic, and bring a towel! There are many groups doing ‘Pump & Dump,’ the practice of coordinating to drive the price of crypto up or down. Keep a cool head, establish a win-loss strategy, and stick to it.
• Never share your private key!!

Where to Buy Cryptocurrencies?

In the world of cryptocurrencies, buying and selling assets has become very easy through centralized exchanges like Kraken, Binance, and Coinbase. These platforms, however, require having at least a credit card (at best) or an identity card (at worst) before they allow you to buy or sell cryptocurrency for fiat money.

There are peer-to-peer purchasing methods through platforms like Localbitcoin (or Localethereum) that allow you to use PayPal, a bank transfer, or even (according to the vendor), pay in cash. Crypto prices on these platforms are often higher than the market, but there are times when a seller forgets to set their prices based on the market value and you can get a good deal.

Some projects like Bisq want to go even further by offering a decentralized exchange, but this requires a high level of technical knowledge, making this solution not easily accessible to the general public.
Since 2010, the possibilities to hold, transfer, buy or sell cryptocurrencies have multiplied and this has provided access to a wide variety of tools paving the way for greater adoption. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.