Bitcoin Forum

Hello guys,

I'm beginner in crypto/BTC, never gambled or traded so far, I would like to have some advise from your experience to help my case.
Let's say I have some savings that I can afford losing, the sum is between $2,000 - $5,000.
The goal is to increase this balance on monthly basis (how much it's hard to say but 3-5% would be nice), a potential profit will go for buying goods to sustain my hobby (fishing gear).
Here the questions:
- what would be the best investment method you would recommend?
- linked to your recommendation, what tools/services you would recommend also (you need to balance the service/features with their fees if any)
- what service you would recommend to convert such crypto to USD or EUR?

I have paypal and EU bank account, I might consider opening a Revolut account or others that can be used to fund my paypal balance, any recommendations on this strategy. are welcome. I don't care (yet) about privacy, in case it's needed, I can declare my extra income to our government finance (so to pay tax based on the declared profit).

I apologies in case you've answered such questions dozens of times before, my personal study still continues.

thank you

Trading/day trading isn't ideal for beginners.

- Buying bitcoin and using the dollar cost averaging method.
- Tool like a wallet? I'd advise you download the Electrum wallet (https://electrum.org/) and store your purchased bitcoins there.
- You can use Binance
https://www.binance.com/en/trade/BTC_USDT
https://www.binance.com/en/trade/BTC_EUR

This is good advice.  You may also consider purchasing BTC directly through PayPal if it ever becomes an option for EUR folks and you are uncomfortable holding your own BTC.

One of the biggest issues that beginners have is that they think they can trade.  Best is to invest, not necessarily trade in the beginning.  One of the main reasons is because new investors in any market do not understand technicals or fundamentals, let alone margin trading.  As a newbie, do NOT margin trade - you will get wrecked. 

I think you need to know how crypto trading and how crypto behaves since you have the funds, I can suggest you join some legit ico's( initial coin offerings) and try to study if there is a possibility to have returns or value, everything you do in crypto has risk I know you are already aware of that? coins tend to go down that will let you think that it will never go up.

Here are some of my suggested sites:

https://poloniex.com/ - trading
https://icodrops.com/ - for presale and coin offerings

Earning money monthly will depend on how you do your research, also try to look here

https://coinmarketcap.com/ - what I do here is look for a coin that has potential and with their coins like posting updates that means there is development every day or updates, then try to look for the graph a tend to look on how long they were down, I'll always buy coins less than a dollar then hold them
but as I said you need to take the risk it doesn't mean you'll earn monthly with it.

HODL!

Trading is too risky:

https://i.imgur.com/QIwB8DC.jpg

---

Especially for beginners, ICO is a very hot potato and many get burned. Unfortunately, ICO space is full of scam projects and successful ones are hard to spot, even for experienced members. ICO marketing is know as very fraudulent to deceive newbies.

---

Also very difficult for beginners to figure out which altcoins have potential. In general, it's very controversial if diversifying is a good idea in crypto. I've written a text about it, evaluating if diversification is really a good idea for newbies: Is diversification into different coins really a good advice for Newbies?  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5199926.0)

Though I agree with learning on how trading works and how it can actually produce a significant profit over time. However, I think it would not be a sound advice to let someone who is a beginner and has little to no experience to invest in ICO's. It can somehow produce some good results but the probability of finding a project that has a practical use cases and is not subjected to pump and dump is not profitable at all. It would take a lot of your time and resources in order to take advantage of those vapourware projects.

---

I agree with @jossiel though. Dollar cost averaging is the most basic strategy you can use to at least grow your momey over time regardless of bitcoin's price.

As for the tools you can just use Ledger Nano S and integrate it with Electrum to serve as your wallet interface after purchasing on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how you plan your DCA. $2k - $5k is a lot of money for me that's why I recommend using HW.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dollarcostaveraging.asp

I would suggest you split your funds into two or even three pieces, the first you use for day-to-day trades (work out what your daily limit is beforehand) second chunk is to make a one off purchase of crypto - it could be just BitCoin, or a spread of other coins and tokens.  The third chunk of funds divide by 52, 26 or 12 and make weekly, fortnightly or monthly purchases in much the same way as the second option.

In twelve month's time you can compare which pays you dividends and which were too much bother for their own good.

I've got a suggestion for you. This is so easy and more stable than trading. I've been into the bumpy road of trading and this is really not for beginner that could risk that huge amount.

Try this out. Buy stablecoin, stake it on Binance savings, their current APY is 5% buv sometime tend to change and increase with your budget of $5k you can secure a 0.5 to 2% of that fund on monthly depends on the progress. I've specifically used their own exchange stablecoin busd and having a good and decent profit. But don't expect a big one's since this is just like saving on a bank with a higher percentage.

Well, you don't specifically mention it but I would do that if you already have something else saved/invested. I mean cash for emergencies and maybe some money in mutual or index funds. I wouldn't buy bitcoin if that was the only extra money I had.

I don't agree with dolar cost averaging as others have said. That strategy only helps you to deal with the psychological of investing. However, if you truly believe that bitcoin price will keep going up in the long term, as most of us do, the sooner you put all in your available money to invest, the better.

@cryptoaddictchie. I am interested with this one.

Well, I am currently exploring the Binance Savings platform and I am seeing various type of savings account, which one of these type are you talking about? I am planning to save some of my USDT that comes from the commission I get on doing freelancing works and I think it would be a good idea to stake an X amount of USDT per month which will serve as my emergency savings account that is based on crypto. Would you mind giving us some more information regarding your experiences?  I am seeig "Locked Savings" and "Flexible Savings".

Many thanks for your advices!
 
What I understood/interpreted:
- trading is the best option in case you would know what you're doing or if you're just a lucky person
- Electrum is the best wallet
- Binance is the best service to exchange BTC to USD / EUR
- mutual funds investment is best for beginners (some banks offer such alternate way of investments besides their deposits with yearly interest)

Further questions or clarifications that might be useful to give additional concrete recommendation:

- it's no rocket science that buying low selling high (but high enough to cover the service's fees + exchange fees) is the basic rule to get profit out of trading => according to your recommendation, Binance is the best here
- In my case I see trading like buying USD / EUR and selling whenever that USD or EUR will trend in a way to have profit => I wouldn't invest in a crypto that is not popular (so I would pick the TOP 3 crypto based on volume)
- I was thinking to trade 1-2 times a week or month, so a semi-passive way for making profit (like a bank deposit but with higher interest) => what's still your best recommended approach? (I still hope I won't get addicted to that method whatever it'll be to end staying online 12hrs/day)

Simply put, I have achieved most of my main personal goals in life, I get extra money from my monthly wage => I "don't know" what to do with such money :) On long term, the best case for me is to work less for my daily job (or just quitting) and spend more time for my hobbies / family -> I might think this crypto world can offer this?

• I wouldn't call it the best option, but if you're really interested in it you can always combine it with hodling. Both have risks, but that of trading is significantly higher, especially if you're playing around with altcoins.
• Electrum is a highly recommend mobile wallet, if you plan on regularly moving your funds around. However for larger amounts which you plan on hodling long-term you should get a hardware wallet like ledger or Trevor.
• It's one of the top centralized exchanges, True. If you're more privacy inclined you can check out decentralized and peer-to-peer exchanges.
• This is down to personal preference Imo.

People sometimes start off low risk when they venture into trading, but eventually go deep into it in search of more profits or when triggered by losses. Avoid getting emotional and only invest amounts you can afford to lose.

Are you ready to invest with up to 5000$ or you are still trying to make the final decision? Pls understand that crypto investment is very risky and you will need lot of patience too to accomplish your goals, stay away from trading because that's even a new whole level of risky for a newbie, bitcoin is over 22000$ and you don't want to go in for that, too risky, what's presently left behind is altcoins, they haven't start surging yet so it's still a good entry point

It's better to start doing research and comparisons between crypto projects to fully understand what makes one better than the other projects, start with top altcoins if it's a must to invest right now, remember, seeking for more knowledge and never stop learning is the way, good luck

- Bitcoin.
- Poloniex uses lending services on their website, so you will have another opportunity to make additional money from the loan.
- You can use Binance to convert crypto to USD or EUR or you can send the money to your bank account.
- Or you can use Paypal directly from your account to convert crypto to USD or else.

I do not recommend you to trade if you do not know about trading because that can confuse buying low and sell high. If you do not mind learning more lessons about trading, you will have the opportunity to profit while you can get more profit from lending.

Buying low and selling high is the basic thing in trading, so you need to learn more about trading.

You can pick ethereum besides bitcoin because I see the ethereum movement is pretty good.
Bitcoin and ethereum trading will be a good choice at this moment.

If you do not know what you need to do with that money, you can invest in crypto, especially in bitcoin and ethereum because that can give you extra money. Just buy both bitcoin and ethereum and hold it until the price increase higher.

It would be better if you start learning the crypto world first before doing trading and investing, both are risky especially trading so I suggest you should learn first. Investing is much better than trading for beginners who don't have good knowledge yet. Just follow the basics of "buy-in low and sell in high" if you do that thing then for sure you will gain profit especially if you invest for a more profitable long term.

Sure mate. I never tried the locked savings but I think it's also good and higher interest compared the flexible. But technically the idea is the same. I like flexible cause anytime what you put stablecoin or any coin on their savings program can be pull out immediately without any tie up or locked.

Its simple computation.

Here is the sample 5% APY or earnings on monthly basis.

$5k usdt on savings
5,000 x 5% / 365= $0.68 daily if you multiply it for a month you could earned approximately $20+ without even risking anything. Of course depends on APY last time the percentage is 8% I'm not sure why it got lowered but it changes ( increase/decrease). Not much but of course if you have more than 5k the earnings are quite considerable.

As a beginner in investing and trading I would recommend to lower your expectations . 3-5% on a monthly basis is a huge profit. If you can sustatin such returns on a long term you make around 50% per year which is a lot. To get these kind of returns you also need to accept a lot of risks. As a beginner it is better to go for less risky trades. In my opinion try to go for a little bit longer time horizon for your trades, when starting out in trading a big problem is trading to often and generate a lot of trading fees. All the fees that you have to pay for buying and selling a coin you will need to earn back.

First of all, I'd advise to stay away from altcoins, especially as a beginner. If you are interested in them, my advice is to start slowly studying them while building your BTC investment.

Dollar Cost Average, which was suggested in the replies above as well, is the strategy I support too. One particular thing I wanted to warn is to be careful about the platform you choose to purchase BTC through and where you want to hold your coins. Revolut, PayPal and other large business names are sometimes not so happy to support their cryptocurrency-investing/trading customers, blocking/freezing their funds for some potentially absurd reasons. As long as you're holding your money on their platform, they pretty much have more power over your coins than you do.

Before anything, just read the Terms and Conditions of the platform you want to start investing on. Be it Binance, PayPal or whatever else, find out if you agree with their terms and if you do, then proceed. Otherwise, find some other company instead - or be your own bank using Electrum (https://electrum.org) as the wallet and HodlHodl or Bisq as the platform to purchase/sell your coins.

I'd first invest it all into bitcoin and not even consider altcoins. If bitcoin investment is climbing up a mountain, altcoin investment is like doing the same thing in a war zone with bombs falling all around you and ground shaking. Sometimes something blows up and throws you towards the peak but most of the time you'll slip and fall lower.

Try to get your first investment out as soon as you can. If you invest 2000 and get a 100% profit, take 2000 out of the market and keep the other 2000 invested. This will calm you down and make you feel like the money you're risking is free.

Investing that money in Bitcoin if you think about it when the market price is at 3,000$ in the past month and selling it at 24,000$ would be a huge profit for someone who invested at the right time.

But to be practical you could always invest in popular coins in the market when the market price is low and take a gamble in it.

You could always visit and create an account in Binance and you could always see a lot of options in Binance where you could invest your money, and you could also try some futures or staking.

As of now, I think, yes. Electrum has been around since year 2011 and and I didn't encounter any issues using their wallet, though it does not offer a good GUI for their users but still, there are lots of function which you can use either advance or just the basic "send" and "receive" function. Much better if you can use it along with Ledger products (Hardware wallet).

Wait? I highly suggest that if you are planning to get into trading using your large chunk of money, it would be a good idea to start first learning first what is a "Risk Management" specifically the risk to reward ratio for every trade you are planning to do on a daily or weekly basis or even on monthly basis or whatever your preference is..Remember that the market does not always favor your bias (long or short), and it could mean that you will consistently make a profit.

Complement your risk management with T.A if you want to stay in the long run. Invest in yourself first to avoid losing much of your hard earned money. ;)

After several more hours spent on reading and watching youtube tutorials then re-reading your answers I can understand them better (still dollar cost average perhaps I'll have to Google).

What I did so far:
- I created an Ubuntu booting USB key
- that allowed me to access my bitaddress.org locally saved on HDD
- I created a brain wallet that gave me private key and public address
- I created also 7 Paper wallet pairs
- I saved both on HDD as .pdf

I don't feel the need yet to go for Trezor One but that will be my option once I learn more.

Now about storing these .pdf files I created, I intend to apply some personal (symmetrical) ciphering on them (or to embed the keys into pictures), even to break them in pieces that I can restore with hex editor or my own script and to store few copies online (emails, Google drive) -> do you see any risk about such method? :)

It's hard to imagine if because what you say is not as beautiful as the right time, if I knew that long ago buying bitcoin at $ 3000 and selling it now might be like but at that time there were different views, some panicked even bitcoin was hard to come back but in reality different and now much higher.

By investing money in bitcoin I think there is no need to worry because this is clearly a popular coin so what we need to hold back is panic when the market is down that's what we have to be able to control because everyone is for a stop-loss and doesn't want to lose big.

On Binance a lot of coins that are at stake can also be a recommendation for the long term.

I'm glad that you know what you are getting into and had the right mindset before investing, of course, you know that diversity should be on top of your priority, and when it comes to investing it should be your own research.
I don't recommend buying and selling Cryptocurrency because of their policy but if you decide to do so be sure not to put all your money here, you can choose PayPal and non-custodial wallet and store your coins there, I always recommend to go for the top coin in the market but leave Ripple because of the issue it's facing right now.

While I think it's great you're taking precautions to store your Bitcoins safely can I suggest you don't get too detailed in the specifics instead just describe more generally in case some one was wanting to try gaining access to your funds (regardless how meagre they may seem to be)

for a coin that has actual real world use (cheap fast used by banks etc) and is fast becoming the currency of the world financial system then ripple xrp.

Fast transactions can also be found via the Lightning Network if you were to set up a node and channels with your Bitcoins.

I suggest you buy bitcoin or Eth and hodl although I won't advise you buy now because of the high price at the moment. Be careful not to fall for scams or buy shit coins. Don't trade unless you know what you are doing. If you eventually do trade don't trade with more than 6% of your capital. I think that's a safe way to invest that much money.

I'll split my investment as something like 80% as BTC for holding (HODL like you like to say even if I don't understand why :D), 10% as ETH and maybe 10% to play around to learn trading with those coins that seems to be more popular but with high percentage in variations in a way to cover the transfer/exchanges fees.
I'll try also to figure out  if there is any link between the EUR/USD trends and BTC/ETH ones or if there is any psychological factor that is influencing the  crypto trends.
As far as I see, it's not the good time to buy now anything but some small amounts to play with in order to learn more about fees and to figure out the best options/services that can be used to get lowest fees when starting with fiat, going through crypto then back to fiat.

Comes from a legendary older post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0) from someone on BTCTalk who was drunk and couldn't write grammatically correct. :D

This is mostly about luck now, honestly. You never know when the bull run ends, nor do you know whether a bear run is on the way. Most of the time, as far as I've noticed, it ends up as a crash post-NYE and then the real bull run begins months afterwards.

But once again, you could start investing a fixed amount every day/week/month so that you get a favorable DCA. Rather than purchasing $25k worth of BTC today and losing half of it if tomorrow Bitcoin falls back to $12k, you could purchase smaller amounts every X days so that the average purchase price moves accordingly. This way, it's much easier to get back to a profit when market crashes happen.

I used to buy fiat this way, small amounts during several days till I reached the sum I needed, of course it can apply to crypto.
My observation during the years (still, I'm not a trader or any financial analyst or so), during Christmas period, at least in my country, the EUR/USD tends to go down so it's good moment to buy. Now you say for crypto it might go down after NYE, I'm sure others in this crypto world found similar patterns so we'll see...maybe neither a bull nor bear season will start but a rabbit one, whatever that will be haha  :D

I hope this is not in the end pure gambling but more like educated guess, watching the world's events and trends for other currencies should help, right?

If you're looking to just park your fiat in crypto then it actually doesn't make sense to buy Bitcoin at the moment (unless you believe it will go even higher when you're looking to cash out) rather use your funds to get a feel for trading and work out which alt coins at this point are down and might give you a better return.

I'd also recommend buying $25 - $50 on a regular basis and build up a modest bag.

This is my conclusion too, I also opened an ad for buying just $50 to play with trading, still my enthusiasm is fading out as I see people are more paranoid than me as nobody wants to sell.
I still don't understand the big difference from preev.com and binance actual exchange rate, I really hope my calculation about Binance /mining fees from the other thread I opened is correct otherwise the trading will be pure gambling for me.

I want to thank you all for your input, I'm now active trader with positive trend of 1-2% daily profit, I think I found a new hobby :D

In the end I agree that a newbie with no technical skills (including Maths skills) should stay away from daily trading.

It depends on what you prefer also we have different kinds of trading.

Short term trading this kind of trading makes you earn possible at the target you would like BUT take care this is the riskiest thing you would like to do. The higher the risk the higher the profit.

We have long term trading which is investments you will make to buy in the dip and hodl for a long time. This is the safest thing.

Those are your options it depends on your patience for me I do both but in short term, trading is just an extra fund.

Don't trade you can't afford.

Buy bitcoin! Buy Ethereum! Or buy bitcoin and Ethereum, these two projects will give you a ease of mind, they are good for long term hold and you can make lots of money by just holding them, the risk of losing money is small, trading requires skills that's why high risk is present, I'd invest instead of trading