With Bitcoin (BTC) peaking at a little over $58,300 recently, it seems a lot of businesses are now investing and a lot of businesses are moving with the times allowing the use of cryptocurrency for trades, a few examples, you can now shop on Newegg using cryptocurrency, also crypto can now be used in various places for betting sites in USA, UK, some places in mainland Europe also there are plenty of places like GiftOff where you can use your cryptocurrency to buy gift cards for many retailers, so while the retailer themselves may not accept crypto, places like this will allow you to trade your crypto for gift cards for these places and honestly, why not?
With a bit of luck these businesses will actually profit more from accepting cryptocurrency in trade for their goods and services. Of course it’s always a risk and the price could nosedive as it occasionally does. Anyway, if you’re interested in buying Bitcoin or various other cryptocurrencies, how do you get started? What steps do you need to take and where can you invest?
Jump Ahead To:
Bitcoin
Originally, investing in cryptocurrency was a little bit of a pain, there were plenty of hoops you’d have to jump through to get involved, however in 2021, the process has become much easier. In most cases all you need is a wallet and a place to buy, in some cases those 2 things are one and the same, example, I use MEW (MyEtherWallet) for my Ethereum, I can use that wallet app to purchase Ethereum also. Handy, right? I’ll come back to that shortly though, for now, should you invest in Bitcoin and if so, HOW and WHERE can we do this?
To start, SHOULD you invest in Bitcoin? The short answer is always going to be, it depends. The long answer, it depends entirely on your situation. If you’re working paycheck to paycheck and only just making ends meet, should you invest? Absolutely not, please make sure you keep food on the table and keep a roof over your head.
If you have some spare cash sitting around, it may be a good idea to take some of that cash and invest it into cryptocurrency, but there’s ALWAYS a risk. Bitcoin was $47k a week ago, it rocketed up to $58k when Tesla invested $1.5billion into the crypto giant. However, not long after it peaked it dropped to $50k again. Crypto is a volatile investing asset and if you’re smart with it you can absolutely make a profit.
Now we’ve got around whether you should, if you answered yes and you want to invest, where can you do it? The first thing is to figure out WHAT you’re buying, you can invest by buying a coin, or if you don’t just have $50k sitting around, same as most people, part of a coin. To start this process you will need a ‘wallet’ to hold your Bitcoin. On the Bitcoin website there is a handy tool to help you choose a wallet that has the features you’re looking for. I would personally suggest something like Bitpay, using this wallet you can buy Bitcoin directly in the app which makes it very easy for a beginner to get into.
There are a lot of wallets with very similar feature sets so for the most part it just seems to be a matter of personal preference.
Ethereum
If you maybe want to invest in something a bit smaller, Ethereum is a good shout, Ethereum recently peaked at $2000, so you may be able to invest in more right now for hopefully bigger if not similar profits in the future. The investment process is basically the same, you buy one or part of an Ethereum, like I said above, the wallet I use is an android wallet called MEW, this wallet is very user friendly, allows me to purchase Ethereum directly in the app for cash and if I want to, I can exchange my Ethereum into a range of other cryptos.
You can also choose to pledge some of your held Ethereum into Ethereum 2 if you’re into that. IF I wanted to cash out however, I would then need to use an exchange like Coinbase or Coinjar, using these places you can sell any held crypto (providing they deal with it) for cash, to your bank account.
That pretty much covers it honestly, there are other ways to invest but I feel like if you’re a beginner looking to get a piece of the cake, you’re going to want something simple, if you’re wanting something deeper I’d assume you already know what you’re talking about. So, with all that said, will you be investing? I jumped on the train at the start of this year, if only I’d had the stones to get involved earlier though huh? Hindsight is a wonderful thing though!
