Cryptocurrencies have been all the rage for the last few years and I hear from people all the time who say that they would like to start investing in crypto but they just don't know how.
I decided to sit down and put together a short post on how you can get started investing crypto without being a very technical person.
The easiest way to think about cryptocurrencies is to think of them as virtual money or shares on the stock exchange. They have a value but you can't physically hold them because they aren't a tangible item. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you don't have to purchase a whole coin, so if the price of a single bitcoin being over $6K is what was keeping you from getting in the game you can purchase as little as 0.00000001 of a bitcoin. This means that if you only want to invest $100 or even just $1 it is possible.
There are also a ton of different coins that you could invest in, so if you are interested in coins that are more privacy based you might be interested in something like Zcash. You can do a bit of research around the internet to try and figure out which coin is right for you (just as you would to find out which ETF is right for your portfolio). I like to used CoinGecko for my research.
Once you have settled on a coin that you think you would like to start investing with there are a ton of options for wallets. Simply put a wallet is where you are going to store your cryptocurrency, think of it as you bank account.
The wallets that I would recommend you to use are Coinbase and Kracken because they make it very easy to get started investing in just about any coin.
The reason that I recommend these is first because Coinbase is a very simple and friendly platform that just about anyone can signup and start using right way. Second, because Coinbase only supports a very limited number of currencies if you want to invest in something like Zcash or Dashcoin, for example, you are going to need to use a service that allows you to trade in other coins thus Kracken.
I have been with both of these wallets for a few years (Coinbase since 2013).
You have to keep in mind that just like investing in the stock market or forex there is a risk when you invest in cryptocurrencies. I have managed to make a small income from my early investment but there is always the chance that you could loose it all. Don't invest more than you are willing to loose and invest responsibly.
