Rule number one: Don't panic! They will try to make you think your investment is something bad and try to make you sell when you shouldn't.
What I most see are people who buy high and sell low when they start seeing their investments going down. But you need to understand that this is not always a good idea, and that the world of cryptocurrencies is a place that does not forgive people weak hearts and hands.
Rule number two: If you are going to diversify your investments in multiple altcoins, do your own research first. DO NOT trust everything that people say, because they tend to try to influence you to buy or sell a coin based on their own interests.
About the ICOs, just like the guy above me said, "you can make a huge profit if you choose a good token". Keep in mind that my advise about the altcoins is also valid to those ICOs: Do not trust everything that people say. I can guarantee you that 95% of all ICOs today are a scam without any developed project and that only care about stealing your money. Do your research and you will be fine!
I've been doing a lot of reading recently on cryptocurrencies in general. I'm not too worried about dips because now that the world is starting to wake up and see that this technology is good for more than just black market transactions and has potential to change banking and many other industries. Especially with the new applications being built on blockchains for data immutability. I've been reading about different ICO opportunities and I can tell its a pretty unregulated space right now. On one hand, that makes it risky, but it also opens up the opportunity for a lot of growth. Ultimately, I think only a fraction of them will be around in a few years so it seems important to read the white paper and do other research about how it is distributed, created, how it scales, and what real world problem it tackles. On that topic, how do you find new altcoin announcements for airdrops and things like that? Many of the topics I found are months or years old when thy started, and the ship has already sailed for being part of the beginning. One more thing about ICOs is that a lot of them don't allow US residents, but if you are paying in BTC or ETH how could they tell where you are from? Aren't they just executed by a smart contract? Is there any legal danger from investing in an ICO as a US resident? Some I found that seemed interesting were ChangeBank and CombiCoin.
So far I mainly have BTC (and some BCH as a result) and some ETH. I also hold some tiny positions in a few alt coins that seemed interesting to me. For example IOTA seems interesting because it is a super new technology, but that also leaves room for security and other concerns. Then there are POS coins (and even NEM with POI) so theres just a lot of research to do. Then theres privacy coins like Monero, NAV, etc because ultimately BTC being open ledger means that someone can see how much money you have when you pay them opening up security concerns among other issues.
It's all a huge topic and I don't have any real life mentors that know anything about this world so it's a bit of a personal journey for me. I lacked the courage to jump into the Bitcoin world when I was younger but I'm ready now.
If you have "decent amount of money" make sure you don't wire it all to one exchange and not hold your money or coins in there for a long time.
If you're planning to hold a lot of coins for an extended period of time get a hardware wallet or make an address offline on a secure device, so that no spyware can get a wind of it
Be smart and keep your money safe. Common newbie mistakes:
Entering suspicious sites or opening suspicious links on a device where your wallets are.
Sending money to unknown addresses or scam services.
Sending money without a fee or with a very low fee.
Not backing up your keys or holding backups on the same device as your main wallet.
Holding money on exchanges.
Yeah I would say that I am working with a decent amount for someone my age. I've been trying to stick to only legitimate exchanges, and never leaving too much money in them because I don't have those private keys. Unfortunately it seems that some alt coins are only available in less reputable exchanges.
What danger is there in sending money with too low of a fee? Does it get lost forever or return to the sending address?
