Bitcoin the start of the cryptocurrency craze but there's actually a lot of other cryptocurrencies out there as well so there's Bitcoin and then there's abunch of other ones often known as alt coins this post is going to be teaching.
You how to buy Bitcoin and how to buy those other ones as well, I find that there's a lot of videos about this stuff but not very many actually showing you the step-by-step how to actually do it so that's what this post is for so it should be pretty fun and I'm pretty excited now if you're a complete beginner and you have absolutely no idea what bitcoin is you might not be ready to start buying it and if that's the case I have an intro video where you can get all of that fundamental knowledge on how it works and everything like that now when you want to buy Bitcoin you have to use something known as an exchange and this is where you give your fiat currency such as I forgot what my currency was called USD the United States dollars that's known as a fiat currency it's the official currency of the United States if you're gonna live in a different country you might be using a different currency but basically you pay with that currency to get Bitcoin in exchange now there are a lotof different types of exchanges out there we're not going to get into all those details in this article we might save that for another one so just follow along we're going to be using an exchange known as coin base and this isa fiat - crypto exchange meaning fiat being like the United States dollar.
Cryptocurrency being Bitcoin there are also exchanges out there that are just crypto to crypto so in that situation you might take Bitcoin and exchange it for ether or some other cryptocurrency starting off though the easiest way to get started is to obviously use fiat currency because you don't have anycrypto currencies so it wouldn't make sense to trade your crypto currencies for cryptocurrencies so we'll start with fiat currencies and we're gonna be usingcoin base now when you sign up for an exchange like this it's going to ask you for some information about you you probably need to do something like scan your driver's license or whatever it might be and that's because these exchanges have to comply with what are known as no your customer laws kyc sothis is basically going to allow them to know who is buying this cryptocurrencynow for crypto - crypto exchanges this might not be the case you might not have to give as much information but again you don't have any currency to start with so this is the easiest route now don't worry it's not a huge process to verify who you are I just signed up I took a photo of my driver's license and I was verified in minutes and was able to start using the full capabilities of the exchange there may be some things you can do without completely verifying your identity by taking a photo of your driver's license but if you want the full capabilities of the exchange then you're going to have to take that step now when you buy cryptocurrency from an exchange such as coin base it's going to sit in your account on that exchange and this might be fine if you're planning on selling or just doing a lot of trading with this cryptocurrency but if you plan on holding this cryptocurrency then you might want to take it and move it to what's known as a wallet which is off of the exchange it's your own thing and it's much more secure because you're the only one who has access to that there's also some downsides to that though because there's no one to call for support or anyone to help you with your account it's all on you and it's your responsibility so I think I'm getting a little bit into the details here the main thing is you start with an exchange you can leave your coins there or you can take them off the exchange and take care of them yourself using a wallet now if you're working with a reputable exchange they'll probably have some level of security or insurance to basically, let you have a layer of trust with them to leave your funds on their exchange now this ultimately comes down to how much trust you have for an exchange because there have been exchange hacks in fact there has been a lot of exchange acts where people have lost all of their cryptocurrency and things just didn't turn out too well for anybody now a lot of people are giving cryptocurrency a try because they like the idea of not having to rely on a central bank or some centralized entity for transfers so with cryptocurrency you can take those coins and you can have complete ownership of them you don't have to leave them in your bank account but if you leave them on an exchange this is similar in nature to leaving them in a bank you're basically entrusting this exchange to watch over your coins which may or may not be something you want to do depending on your level of comfort and what you're trying to do but if you're getting into cryptocurrency to kind of get away from the whole centralization of everything and then you leave your coins in an exchange it pretty much defeats the whole purpose because now you're just transferring the responsibility from a bank to an exchange which is probably factors at times more insecure because there's been tons of exchange hacks so if you're working with any serious amount of coins and you're not planning to actively trade those then I wouldrecommend putting them into your wallet and there's all kinds of different wallets.
It is a shame to waste the money to buy BTC.