Welcome to cryptocurrency man.

Like the others stated its your chance to get in early on something before it is built. Here are some things you need to take note of though around ICO's

1. a lot of them are scams, you should be careful of high % premine and make sure you research it A-Z. Look out for things like fake team members.
2. Make sure it has an actual use case and is something that will benefit humanity. There are tons of things that really dont need a blockchain
3. Dont ever pay for an ICO from an exchange, most of them are ethereum based so send your funds from Myetherwallet. If you send from an exchange you will lose your money.
4. ICOs are extremely high risk, dont put in a lot of money. You really dont need to put in much. A good ICO will give you 10-100x gains. Unfortunately they are the minority. There is a good chance of taking big losses.
5. One of the biggest things I look for in an ICO is users. Users = value, I dont put my own money into anything that doesnt have at least 100k ICO participants, that would also reduce the risk of a scam since its not likely for so many people to miss some evidence of a scam in their investigation.

Again, research the hell out of everything before you put money in it. Remember youtubers will often times promote an ICO with a referral link. In these cases consider if its really a good product or if they just want to get free coins off you.

Play it safe, 5-10% of your portfolio into ICOs is fine, dont put your rent money into ICOs.

Hi mate
With regards to that message you got around the payment ID, if you go to any exchange that accepts Monero you can just go to deposit Monero then it will generate a payment ID for you. This payment ID stays valid forever.

MAKE SURE YOU DOUBLE CHECK THE ADDRESS AND PAYMENT ID !

You can then just send your monero over to the exchange and sell it for BTC. If you are using a command line wallet:
1. run the CMD and get the blockchain downloaded
2. Open you wallet and wait for it to sync
3. type in "save" on both the cmd and wallet so you dont have to wait long next time
4. type in "transfer" <public address> <Amount> <payment ID>
   
    The syntax i gave on .4 might be the wrong way around but it wont let you transfer to a payment ID so you can type in "help" to confirm the syntax, if it stops you then just switch it around - you can check vids for electroneum wallet CLI transfers too, its a monero fork so the same will work (ofc make sure to use monero wallets and stuff then dont download electroneum wallets and send your monero there)

5. "type in show_transfers" in the wallet CLI to see the transfer and if it has cleared
6. wait about 5-20 minutes and it should be cleared

Hope the above helps you. If you have your private keys then you can just download the wallet CLI. Make sure you are getting the correct one - I wont be pasting the link here as I myself dont trust any links people share on bitcointalk

cheers

Keep $400 one side and only go in with $100 at first, you will likely make some mistakes and lose some money while you learn. At least untill you are comfortable with sending funds around and using the correct wallets.. how ICOs work and all that.

Just get your feet wet man, and remember to question everything you see, dont risk too much into one thing. There are lots of scams out there.

I would advise that you split the full $500 up into different sized coins, such as 250 high caps(top 10) 150 mid caps(rank 11-30) 100 low caps( rank 31-70)
This would give you a nice split on risk/reward.

If you make some gains from these you can maybe move some into an ICO in a later date, but ICOs arent great if you are new due to the risk level.

My list of coin names to look into:
bitcoin
ethereum
eos
icon
litecoin
steem
cindicator

take  this with a grain of salt. dont ever buy anything just because someone said so  !

P.S. be careful of lending platforms

Mining monero or forks of it isnt too bad. I have been mining electroneum with my gaming laptop untill a while ago(difficulty started getting high).

The best is to look for a good price vs difficulty ratio. If you find something nice to mine you can always swap that for BTC or something on an exchange.
You should look at how much % of the total hashpower you can have on a coin that holds some value at least, this is sometimes more profitable.

All these mining pool sites will have calculators on for how many coins you can mine so you can do the math like that.

Keep it simple and to the big ones at the start. Get  yourself some BTC and maybe a token or two. For any token you need to try logically assess if there is a business use case behind it, or if it is something that would benefit the world and has a market for it.

A lot of tokens are addressing problems that aren't there, there are a ton of them doing exactly the same thing. You would often times see someone just fork some protocol. Lets say Monero for now; their site will just say "Decentralized, peer to peer,  anonymous currency".
Well yea, of course they forked monero but that project didn't bring anything new to the table, they just copy pasted some code. In that case I would stick to the original.

My best advice is to try think about these things level headed and never buy the latest "CHEAPEST AND HOTTEST ALTCOINS! ". Be careful of hyped up pump and dumps.

Basically in short on you can correctly sign a message with your private key if you hold your private key. Nobody else can sign the message no matter how hard they try. So it is a good way to prove identity.

As the other guys said, NEVER share any form of a private key. You can share a public key though.

In times of bad pricing we should remind ourselves why we are bitcoin adopters. I got in on this initially hoping to clear off my debt, as I got more and more all in on bitcoin I started understanding the use cases for cryptocurrency.

This stuff will change the world. If we all take a bit of time to think about the possibilities for cryptocurrency the price becomes irrelevant. I get excited when I think about programmable streaming money. A more inclusive economy will bring prosperity to many across the world.

It is easy to judge the state of bitcoin by it's price, but I think that's a wrong way to look at it. Stay part of this space, help build the new free world. Getting money is a byproduct - an added perk, it shouldn't be the goal.

This will be huge, give cryptocurrency some time.

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There are worse Joke ICOs IMHO. But yea, I am still waiting to recieve my TPAY. I am generally the patient guy with all these things but I kind of agree it all could have been handled better.
You don't always get the all star teams in ICOs, it is what it is. 

Problem is these telegram admins usually represent the ICO much more than the team does. I think there needs to be more focus put on getting mature people running these groups.
I have had a similar experience with another ICOs group where I stated it is listed on coinmarketcap and got banned ?? WTF. But in the end of the day it was this other ICOs telegram admins wrongoing, nothing to do with the coin itself.

I currently expect TPAY to just do okay, not good or not bad.. just okay. We will see I guess.

There is one similar thing I am aware of, Iconomi. Go check it out. I am not using it right now but it looks like a cool idea.
As I understand it  you can go to that site and setup a portfolio,  you can choose almost any coins youd like with their relevant percentage. This portfolio will then be advertised on their site, you can then invest ICN tokens into it for which their smart contract will buy the assets in their relevant ratios to back that up. Through this you can probably do an ETF type of thing.

**Disclaimer**
I am not a master of this, I didnt spend a hundred hours researching it, but the above is basically as I understand it. It is something worth looking into in my opinion.
 I havent scam checked them or anything, so take my above suggestion with caution and check them out yourself properly.

Go check google trends mate

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin

Here are the countries in Africa and their ranking for bitcoin searches
1. South Africa - Yes we hold rank 1 
9. Ghana
10. Nigeria

It is getting quite huge in these 3 countries, growing really fast. Speaking for South Africa, I can go to any 15-35 year old that I know and ask them about bitcoin and they will either be invested in it or at least know of it.  Remember cryptocurrency will penetrate fastest in places where people do not have the best and most honest government.

I think we should start more meetups, growing our community in Africa will help this become more adopted and grow faster.  I actually just saw this sub-topic or whatever you can call it. We should figure out how to

Well I think we are starting to scale already, segwitt has been getting a good amount of adoption lately, other things like Schnorr signatures (I think i spelt that wrong lol) etc are also incoming. I am personally at the stance that a 2Mb block for now would have been good while other things are being worked on.

I don't think this is "core developers being corrupt" or anything. I reckon anyone who got in as early as them don't need more money anymore. If you take a look at BTC's github you will see that a ton of commits are happening. I am fine with waiting a bit while all these things get sorted. We are definitely seeing progress happening on scaling. LN is a good fix but I agree not a fix for everything. It will sort us out for micro transactions for things like streaming services etc. I am aware it doesn't fully fix ad hoc transactions directly but it will take a load off the blockchain.

We should remember this technology is still new, things take time to be developed. I am fine with waiting a bit longer. My biggest worry is  how we as a community start fighting each other.
 I will leave coin names out of this since I don't want to instigate an argument here but I do want to make a point.

We see certain movers and shakers of certain coins accusing other developers of lying and not allowing people to speak and all kinds of stuff. Where this used to be one community we seem to be forking off just like BTC. I think people need to take a step back and look at what we are trying to do here. In the end of the day all cryptocurrencies - apart from scam ICO's of course are on the same team. All these projects aim to bring a more fair and non-corrupt world.
 It really slows us down if we keep attacking each other. We will move this whole industry forward much faster if we can get to a point where we can say "okay cool you fork and do your thing - I wish you luck" instead of  "screw you guys I am starting my own coin".

I know the argument of scaling is much more complex than the above, but I think you get the idea. We should move to team everyone instead of team "insert coin name". Opinions on things will of course always differ, but lets remember we are all on the same team here.

P.S. if any developer of any coin sees this - thanks for all your work

Agreed, we went up very fast. I think its a good thing we dropped down to the current level. 2018 has been absolutely insane so far, think back to start of January where you would see some alts moving up 70% in a day for a few days straight.

Even if this is a bubble and we are all naive idiots believing in this dream it is all fine as long as everyone is responsible and people dont take loans or sell their houses to buy BTC. Just stay responsible.

Not sure what your countries laws are, but in general all exchanges that accept fiat currency need to do KYC. So for the most part if there is some exchange that you can swipe your credit card on and that doesnt do any KYC - I would run for the hills.
Such an exchange generally speaking would not be compliant with law and will either be a scam or be shut down very quickly.

If you do not want to wait 5 days, I would suggest you go via localbitcoins. But please use common sense, a lot of people are getting robbed etc. Go do the trade in a public place like a mall. You can walk to the ATM with the guy and draw the cash then and there, dont carry it with you beforehand and make sure you go with a seller who has a good reputation on localbitcoins. You will probably pay more for your BTC like this though.

Go sort out your KYC with a trusted local exchange while you are at it, then you can easily trade BTC next time.

Like everyone else said, I think you will just need to accept the loss. I dread the day it happens to me.

I would suggest you:
1. immediately burn all your old wallets and move your funds to new ones for whatever crypto you may have left.
2. Store private keys on paper where ever you can.
3. Format your PC, master reset your phone
4. Change your email password

If one thing got compromised you should always assume everything has been.

Best of luck mate, sorry for your loss.

Here are some misc things that I think crypto will fundamentally change:

1. Salaries
It will become possible for an employer to pay you by the second, they can pair this with software on your PC thatl only let you get paid when you are actually working. Yea this sounds like a bad idea but I think its a fantastic one, this gives you a reason to work harder. This means when you go to the DMV or any government document place you wont be standing in a line, those people wont be on 24/7 tea breaks.
All businesses will perform better and be more profitable, this means more jobs will be created in turn

2. Music and entertainment.
Most musicians see like 5% of their actual album sales, the whole industry is riddled with middlemen, a bunch of leeches taking money for someone elses work. I was checking on Steemit the other day, wow... really.. wow..  there are some amazing musicians out there that have no album out, no record deal, nothing. These guys will be able to monetize their talent easily

3. Government
In the end of the day, once we achieve mass adoption, and we all transact in a private way. I believe governments will be forced to adopt on open blockchains. Money they spend on services like hospitals and schools will be auditable by the public at any time. Meaning they will have a much harder time being corrupt and stealing money.  This means quality of life for everyone will greatly improve.

Money and value has become programmable. This is freaking huge, the possibilities are endless. Thats why even if the market cap goes to $1, I will still believe in this. Bitcoin and smart contracts will bring prosperity to all. Money will no longer flow upward, it will flow in a circle and cycle through hands.
I look forward to seeing a better world in 10 years.

Hi mate
It's good that you kick things off with research first, knowledge and understanding is everything in this game.
Here are some things you need to avoid when subscribing to youtube channels - these in general are channels run by people who hype things up and have no knowledge of cryptocurrency. They often times just make videos to monetize their viewers (make you sign up for something so they get a referral)

1. Thumbnails with a lambo and 9999% growth
2. People talking about cheap and hot coins
3. Anyone who has 50 referral links in their descriptions
4. People who just talk about the market around the "flavour of the week coin"
5. Anyone promoting lending platforms - if you really wana go into these thats, well, sorta okay.. but know they are EXTREMELY HIGH RISK. Dont go in big.

I would suggest you get yourself a good understanding of the underlying technologies. Some good channels I recommend checking out is
Ivan on tech
Boxmining
David hay
Doug polk crypto (its just really funny content overall lol)

This forum is also a great place to learn, read other peoples posts. I didn't use this much when I was new to the game, which I kind of regret. It would have saved me a few headaches.

I think there is a sort of a bubble in crypto, the market as a whole isnt a bubble though.
There are a ton of ICOs that have hundreds of  millions in marketcap, yet they dont even have a working product yet. I expect we will see a cleansing on altcoins at some stage.

As for BTC, no the value to me is what this technology is meant to achieve. Where before has it ever been possible for a random person with $50 to invest into anything ?  BTC will remain the reserve currency for crypto. I dont see it ever dissapearing because I dont see crypto dissapearing.

EOS and Cardano  scale into hundreds of thousands per second. IOTA is just "slow at 100tps" because it scales with the size of the network, which isn't big now. But should IOTA make good on their promises and become the payment system for all things IOT, we would easily see millions of transactions per second.  (I think Cardano also falls into that category)

Regarding how it replicates data,as I understand it its  kind of like Anycast traffic (you can can google that) where it is "one to closest".  But this replication is just a transaction as far as I know, then follows a round of pseudo voting. The timestamps are sort of like blocks.  I don't  think that all transactions are held in a database by all nodes in the hashgraph network though.

Modern blockchain projects still beat this hashgraph by far, but they are aiming at selling solutions to business. This means its meant for an entirely different use case and it is an entirely different technology.

Its cool that it exists, I am sure Swirls will do well with their product, but it wont replace BTC, its different things. Its like comparing Visa transactions to a home loan - different things.