Hence beginners should not jump into investing or trading. They should spend more time understanding how to secure their wallet and devices because that is the biggest hole they already have and is correctable. Learn about phishing and scams and how to avoid those and then start thinking about which coin to buy.

Although you ask about altcoin, I will suggest you Bitcoin. Reason is simple, bitcoin is the only coin that has censorship-resistance and decentralization. It may not be completely anonymous but you can work around that without breaking a sweat unless you are looking for laundering money.

But like I said, securing your system is more important first. Learn about the bitcoin network works and how the price of bitcoin moves and news of the world have been influencing the price. Then only you will be able to choose the correct point to buy or sell. Do this from reading price charts on any site of your choice.

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If you are too keep about only altcoin, then you go for ETH.

I used to call them shitdrops for people who are willing to take shitcoins.

Good thing you finally realized the truth about airdrops and shitcoins being spread using the false tag of "Free Money" - it is like collecting pebbles which have no value. You can spend time and energy on collecting as many as you want but they are all worthless, unless you can find a use for them. In reality though pebbles might have a use in construction. But not shitcoins, they are worthless and forgotten within a few months.

Many people ended up giving their KYC for getting these shitcoins. That was plain stupid and risky.

If you can spend crypto in your local stores to buy daily necessities - then it is good for you. But not everyone lives in such countries today. In many places bitcoin and crypto are grey areas.

Fiat has its importance of running the economy, you can just be so stubborn to save money in crypto completely which has its own risks. There needs to be a fine balance between saving fiat and saving crypto and this will be governed by what mode is being accepted in your country.

I think fundamentally "good" coin is bitcoin and that is a leading cause of why so many shitcoins actually exist. Because they all try to copy and bring their names to fame from bitcoin - the coin that everyone needs to focus on. So if someone wants to get into crypto, they should use the term singularly for bitcoin and stalk its price for getting a point to buy in.

Today the price is still below 43k USD. Even now is a good time to buy if you looking to sell at 50k.

Mind my words here - only if you are willing to take the risk that the price rise after this then only you should buy this dip. In case you are not feeling good about that, I would suggest to hold on to your fiat and wait for bitcoin to drop even lower than 40K USD at which point you should start buying at every 5k level dips.

I understand you are going in for short term, in which case, both the above methods might not be worth it. Short term needs day trading skills and these are md-long term propositions. Getting more coins just because you cant buy bitcoin at current price is a wrong move. Altcoins can never be as much as bitcoin has been. Never spend your precious money on shitcoins like that, because this will happen again and you will face this decision again.

With time a trader is able to identify more than one trading pair to be profitable. So it is defenitely recommended, but do not over do it. Dont end up having to analyze more than what you can digest. Sick to some pairs that you have found to be profitable over the years and keep a lookout for the trends.

This is possible after having gained some experience over years. If you are newbie, you might want to real time trade your previous pair while paper trading the possible next pair. Then you can be satisfied whether your assumption was right or wrong.

Make sure that the first pair you started with is still within your predictable limits. Dont attempt to use a new pair just to cover up losses made in another pair.

Actually you dont. What you do is your own decision.

I would again like to point out the fallacy in this statement. In spot trading, you are not "losing" money every time you end up doing a wrongly placed trade. What you would get is possibly a shitcoin in return. But you have not lost your money till you sell that shitcoin and realize your unrealized P&L. While in margin trading you are defenitely losing money because it is a type of gambling.

I think it is better if every trader starts by dummy trading on paper than jumping into trading in real. By doing dummy trading you can actually know if you can make any money trading or if trading is not your thing - which is often a case. Not everyone can have the nerves of trading and therefore potential losses can be prevented.

It is good for practice too, but few have the patience to do that. Majority of the newbies are going to FOMO only.

Bringing DeFi, NFT to the table does not change the fact that they are not traded in terms of BTC - the first preference of all merchants is BTC and it is the one coin that no exchange would dare to not have listed.

Moreover, these projects that come up, remain for short periods of time. At this point this statement might feel wrong to many of you reading this, but this same situation happened when the ICO hype was going crazy. Everyone thought that the market was tipping away from bitcoin to their favourite altcoin but very soon the reality came into view. Bear market started and every altcoin went down by 100%, even bitcoin did but with time it recovered back while the altcoins remained that way, their teams abandoned and investors money whisked away.

Do you still think some shitcoin should define the market?

The correct statement indeed. They should be used as "indicators" because they indicate a movement, they do not predict it.

Those selfish people you mention are not traders, they are manipulators who attempt to use the unregulated nature and chaos in the market to fuel their own needs and fill up or empty their own bags on unsuspecting naive traders.

However, people will not learn from these mistakes. There will some fools who will again fall for the next manipulation move and end up in a loss. The diligent ones will attempt to join the same side of the manipulators, in order to dump when they say buy and buy when they say dump. One can try using this strategy too in future.

This is a very tricky metric to rely on.

You see a team will always show a smiley face when visiting a social media because it is PR. Whatever is going on in the internal section is none of the public's business. In fact majority of the newly launched altcoins devs are left unpaid or paid in their own shitcoins which have no value. This runs for a while before the devs stop caring and abandon it.

Now it is very difficult to judge a project by just its team and how they are working. Everything may be good about them but internal takeover happens one fine day and the price crashes to near zero for the next few years.

Trading causes temporary changes in price often manipulated by FUD or FOMO to extrapolate a small change into a big one. It is human nature to follow others and thus this occurs in a speculative market. It is a cyclical process too, so new traders should stop thinking that the drop is forever or the rise will keep on going up. It will be bound to change to opposite - just a matter of when.

The effect of the pandemic on price was minimal though. As with most economies, initially there was a drop in price of stock indices but it was short-lived. Also you cant expect the entire population of the world using bitcoin. We are far from that scenario, and not everyone has access to smartphones or working internet everywhere.

Th digital mode of spending fiat became more useful. Bitcoin acceptance had remained same that time.

It is so easy to create these type of pages, take just a few seconds to copy the pics and information from the original site and Voila! you have your own impersonation page.

A word of advice to anyone reading this : please stop following social media cryptocurrency pages and so - you will likely come across these types of scams if you do. Keep your social media to personal use only - dont show interest in crypto in those. Use a separate account if you need to.

And remember that money is never created out of thin air - if someone tells you that they can give returns that are way over a bank's interest rate, there is a 100% chance that the person is lying and is going to steal your money.

Small cap vs larger cap and short term vs long term - we are talking about four possibilities here.

The best thing is to divide the capital big or small, into long term and short term investments. The amount of capital is not important in my opinion. As long as you are having a specific goal towards the specific investments you should be doing good.

It is a wrong step to consider that a large capital means you can take more risk - you will likely be playing an unsafe game. Instead divide whatever capital you have. And dont think about going for altcoins, when I say to diversify it mean to go for things other than crypto, namely fiat markets.

Recognition is not equal to buying. Being able to read and being able to buy the thing you are reading about are two different thing. There are so many countries where people have heard about about bitcoin but can they allow themselves to buy it? A lot of problems arise there.

Also with more novice players, the price will rise up inorganically because they will likely FOMO.

Comparing with the worldwide use of other modes, I agree. Spending bitcoin for common goods is way less to give it a mainstream tag.

We can be hopeful that in future we will see better acceptance and use. There are methods to mitigate the price volatility but they will come in when the acceptance is larger than today.

It is true that bitcoin is not accepted as a mode of payment in majority of the countries in the world while precious metals are still trade-worthy with a bit of paperwork.

One will face a lot of problems trying to exchange bitcoin into liquid currency in contries where it is prohibited or just not known to people.

Also price changes are not indicators of good or bad. A bad year can happen to any asset but that does not determine what its uses are. In fact, fundamental uses of gold are there and therefore the market price, indeed making it a good asset for long term. Bitcoin has its own uses and therefore it is also a good asset for long term.

Like I have said in similar threads before, both have their own pros and cons. I think a diligent investor looking to build a portfolio should take in both.

Nobody knows. It can be any number possible.

Nobody planned anything - thats absurd to think of. The price in USD is determined by the buying and selling that happens on exchanges and not by the "plans" of anybody.

What you speak of is called an All-time-high and it will probably well understood that after a high a sell off will start at any point of time and this is currently the sell off having started for one day.

Same answer, nobody knows. We can only speculate about the prices.

These are bull and bear cycles. The two poles of the spectrum which continuously oscillate between these points. Prices will changes based on demand vs supply - what you need to do is take advantage of the bear movement and buy bitcoin.

Well you are asking this on a bitcoin forum and you are likely to get only a skewed input from the members.

The amount might be small in terms for USD but you can still buy bitcoin with it in fractional amount - something that newbie investors dont wish to take into account and only go for the "1BTC" mindset.

Then again you can go for fiat markets - you may get better options there to choose from. Leading companies stocks or a bit of precious metals would not hurt. But better if you could get some more capital.

Currently the bitcoin price is going down - so this would be the proper time to buy it. Do not forget there are risks associated with every sort of investment.

Stay away from "new projects" - you will only find hyped altcoins that are going to end up with zero long term value.

Whats up with all these hacker stereotyped images to make sculptures?

I mean the whole pop-culture seems to consider Satoshi to be some black-hood wearing Legion mask donning creep. Cant they all just consider them to be similar to any other common person. Anarchists and all dont really show off that persona. It is more like a method to remain anonymous which has been made popular by mainstream media.

Never been a believer in "idols" so the above sculpture should be considered as image only as a placeholder of Satoshi - nobody actually knows who they are. For any newbie reading this, they should understand the crux of this statement.

But most institutional services have started this. You might not be aware but some banks have already started developing blockchain tech for their services and they are running as well.

The public opinion and government opinion about blockchain is positive but the government opinion on bitcoin is sometimes negative. Though this will change in future.

The base tech remains same. And I dont think we want the crypto projects to run their blockchains into mainstream services. After all major altcoins are all failures for the start and they have zero proper use cases.

Definitely looking forward to regulation - because once that has happened mainstream adoption will take a big step forward.

My answer to this is bitcoin. You cant deny that the track record of development and usage of bitcoin has been the biggest till date out of all cryptocurrencies. It is a top coin and it cannot be removed from this list, in fact it is the list.

You can go around checking the lists on CMC or CoinGecko and make innumerable lists of coins with good fundamentals (apparently) but you will never find the long term value in either of those, because they all lack inherent market making capability and the ability to spend your coins for some service. Hence the majority of altcoins will fail in the long run being fueled by hype.

If you are looking for advice to buy something, just my personal opinion that bitcoin should be bought and that too at prices below 40k USD as target. The lower the better.

Sounds good, provided you can cope up with the losses and not allow the "expenses" to get over your head.

I have always felt the term "Loss" being misused a lot in trading. You dont lose money if you are spot trading crypto - you have just converted the more safer asset in something more risky. It can give you a profit but will probably take time. Either way you have not lost your money unless you sell at the loss.

I tend to look at Spot to be the thing in trading but there exists a margin trading too, where a loss is really a loss of money because it is a type of gambling.

In either case, looking at failures as learning points for future reference makes the trader learn a lot more than brooding over a loss. So keep it going.