First heard about bitcoin in 2010, always thought it was that dodgy anonymous currency pedos on the deepweb used for their illegal shit.
Just put £10 into it on Coinbase, complete noob to all of this.
In all that time I've been trying/failing to graduate with a degree. So stupid
Pic related: My bank lol
no one wants to here your sob story
but other than that keep investing nigga
Aye apologies, that did come across a bit beggy. Was more wanting tips on getting started.
Like is Coinbase alright or should I use something else?
First thing you need to know is:
Don't keep your coins on coinbase.
Also, you kinda missed the boat on turning £10 into any significant amount of money with bitcoin.
Even if bitcoin managed to reach a price of 1 million (which is extremely unlikely to happen), your coins would go up in value by 5500%, which would give you only about £550 from the £10 you bought today.
If you want to see big gains, you're going to have to buy a larger amount or invest in a different coin that still has a small market cap.
If you don't care about money and just wanted part of something new and exciting, that's fine. But this is Veeky Forums so I assume you do want to make some money.
>But this is Veeky Forums so I assume you do want to make some money.
What did he mean by this?
>I assume you want to make some money
Bad assumption kiddo I'm here for the pink wojak shitposting
Oi bruv you proper chuffed init?
what's wrong with coinbase?
Was more just a curiosity aye, but I do want to learn more and then invest as much as I can in it.
>Don't keep your coins on coinbase.
why?
>£10
Congrats you might have £200 in 5 years.
Am I right in just avoiding altcoins?
No. There are plenty of reputable altcoins. Just stay away from shitcoins. You will learn to tell the difference eventually.
Because they are not your coins until you hold the private key.
If coinbase was to go down, like it did earlier today, you can't use your coins. If coinbase were to get hacked and have all their coins stolen, you would lose all your coins.
(Google mt gox, it was an exchange similar to coinbase where lots of people lost all their coins when it was hacked).
Coinbase can also basically just tell you to fuck off and keep the coins if they wanted to.
(btw, this isn't exclusive to coinbase, it's a bad idea to store coins on any exchange.)
It's fine to keep your coins in an exchange for small amounts of time while you're trading (coinbase included), but if you are holding long term, you should store your coins in a hardware wallet, or a paper wallet, or at the very least use a desktop wallet like electrum.
How do I make a hardware wallet? I assume I can't just use any external hdd
you gotta buy one
alright so not worth until serious investment. I set up an electrum just now anyway
pay off your debt before you start investing, your interest on that monthly is probably 10 eurofagcoins or more, wth are you thinking?
Debt is slavery user
In final year of engineering with some jobs lined up, I'll be out of my overdraft by summer.
No one wants to be a wagecuck though. Thats why I'm here to learn before I can even make anything with it all
You'd have to buy a trezor or a ledger. They are devices made specifically for storing crypto and are the safest bet but they cost around £100.
You don't really need one unless you are storing a significant amount of money.
Paper storage is free and is the second safest option.
Google how to make a bitcoin paper wallet.
It's basically just writing down your private key on a piece of paper and keeping it somewhere safe. Paper isn't connected to the internet, so it's safe from hackers. To be extra safe, you should generate the private-key on a computer that isn't connected to the internet.
It's fine just to keep it in coinbase for now though since it's only £10.
But you should look into this stuff if you are going to start holding large amounts.
Ah also, it's a student overdraft so there is no interest rate
PS
since you just mentioned you got electrum.
You can use electrum to make paper wallets.
Just write down your seed instead of the private keys.
You can even set up a watch-only wallet in electrum so you can keep sending more coins to your paper wallet and check that they got there safely without having to have your private keys on the computer.
They have a guide how to do it somewhere on their website.
Thanks user, I'll get on that.
Know anything about mining? I just got an app for that.
How the fuck does a "paper wallet" even work? How do you hold purely digital money on paper? Where would they go? Where does the key come from?
np fellow brit-bro
i wouldn't bother with mining. You can't make any money with it any more unless you are chinese and have dedicated hardware.
it'll cost you way more in electricity than you'll make in bitcoin.
You could try mining some other smaller coins though.
Vertcoin is designed to be minable by anyone.
What would you class as a large amount?
I have £500 in BTC, should I be keeping that off the exchange?
Yeah I'm wondering also. Probably thousands though
Personally I wouldn't keep that much on an exchange when I wasn't actively using it. That's just me though. It depends on how much you personally can afford to lose.
bitcoin is just a number associated with an address.
You can send bitcoin to an address even if that address was generated offline and has never seen an internet connection.
Theoretically you could even come up with a bitcoin private key in your head, use math to figure out what the public key would be, then send bitcoin to that public key without the private key ever leaving your brain.
You are probably wondering what stops two people from accidentally generating the same key since they can do it offline. The answer is that keys are long enough, and if they're generated randomly, that the chance of that happening is so infinitely small that it is basically impossible. The number of possible keys is 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976.
alright well how do i get my coins from coinbase
Click the accounts tab.
Click on the bitcoin wallet.
Click send.
Then input the address you want to send to.
Make sure the address you are sending to is correct, don't fuck it up because you will lose your coins forever.
Make sure you are sending to an address that you have control over.
There are probably youtube tutorials for this if you search for it.
Also be aware that bitcoin transaction fees are high right now. it costs bitcoin to send bitcoin.
what about to "sell" bitcoin and turn it into USD?