Getting started with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

[enixon291077]

I too have problem with password 

[MR2O4]

Tip #5: Register a Moon Bitcoin account

Moon Bitcoin is a faucet in the classic sense. I recommend it here because like Free Bitcoin, it is a longstanding and stable faucet. You register on Moon Bitcoin by simply entering a receiving address. Enter your Free Bitcoin deposit address so that your earnings can get sent over to your interest bearing Bitcoin wallet.

Moon Bitcoin uses an intermediary service called CoinPot. It sends your earnings to CoinPot, which also aggregates earnings from other faucets. You can then request a withdrawal of the coins directly to your registration address. If you visit five other faucets which use CoinPot, then your faucet earnings will pile up faster than they would if you were only visiting one supported faucet.

Once you've registered on Moon Bitcoin, then find and register for a few other fauets, making sure to use your Free Bitcoin deposit address each time you register.

Visiting faucets is fun. You just don't want to overdo it. I recommend regularly visiting no more than ten faucets, and make sure that all proceeds from all the faucets go directly to your Free Bitcoin deposit address.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, especially those living in the US.

Moderator edit: Removed referral link

This tip isn't as good as you other ones - you can't simply send your earnings over to Free Bitcoin and I'd can't find five faucets that link to CoinPot...

[wiser]

This tip isn't as good as you other ones - you can't simply send your earnings over to Free Bitcoin and I'd can't find five faucets that link to CoinPot...

I did check, and Coinpot will send your earnings to the Moon Bitcoin registered address once 25,000 satoshi accumulate, so in that respect you don't have to do anything. But with the high Bitcoin price which corresponds to low faucet earnings, it's going to take a long time to reach that threshold on just one faucet.

Coinpot is one of several faucet aggregation services. I remember one called Faucetbox and another called Coinbox. Not sure if either of those are working now.

Honestly the reason I recommended Moon Bitcoin is because of its longevity. So many faucets come and go, but this one, along with Free Bitcoin, has stood the test of time. They recently contracted with Coinpot for distributions, but before that, their own internal threshold was 25,000 satoshis before they would pay you, so that part hasn't changed.

Edit: I tried to link a full blown Coinpot account to my Free Bitcoin deposit address and I will admit that is going to be at best an annoying process and at worst won't even work at all. What happened was I tried to register a Bitcoin Bonus faucet account, and it required me to register with an email account. Well, that registration automatically registered me with a full blown Coinpot account which wasn't the same account as the one connected to my Moon Bitcoin faucet address. So then I tried to link the two accounts and Coinpot wants me to either sign a message with the address or send a small deposit from it to prove that I own it. Well, since it's a Free Bitcoin address, I don't technically own it. I tried to send a small deposit, but it's probably not going to come from that particular address, which means I just blew many many claims worth of faucet earnings to try to prove ownership of an address I really don't own. I contacted their support to explain the situation but I'm not holding my breath for a reply. Personally I think demanding proof of ownership of addresses for faucet earnings is overkill.

So, what I would recommend you do once you register a Moon Bitcoin account (using your Free Bitcoin address) is to immediately then register the Coinpot account as a full blown account and hopefully the address will link that way with no fuss. Then when you register for other faucets using your email address, just use the same email address as you used to register your Coinpot account. But the important thing is to register your Coinpot account first, then register for the other Coinpot faucets. Someone who does this, please post here how it went.

I unfortunately did it in the wrong order, so for now I have one Coinpot account that is linked to my Moon Bitcoin faucet address (which is my Free Bitcoin address), and another Coinpot account with no addresses that will collect earnings from Bonus Bitcoin and Bit Fun. This simply means that I'll have to accumulate 25,000 satoshis in two accounts rather than just one, so not as efficient. And in order to send the earnings from the email-based Coinpot account I'll have to locate a Bitcoin address that I actually own, which may honestly not be worth it to me at this point. I'm hoping for a favorable response from my support request.

[wiser]

Tip #6: Start keeping records

This is a tip I sincerely wish that I had put into practice when I first got going with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as I am now in the unenviable position of having to reconstruct the story of my involvement in cryptocurrencies as told by hundreds, possibly thousands, of different transactions.

You can see from the above post that sometimes things in the cryptoworld end up being more complicated than anticipated, and that is definitely the deal with Coinpot and its connected faucets. Don't sweat the faucets. The main point with doing anything with them is to start working with actual Bitcoin. There is nothing like actual experience to get a real education. Have fun with the faucets and get the experience, but my sincere hope is that it won't be long before you move beyond them. And anyway, the real important faucet site is Free Bitcoin, not so much because of its faucet feature, but more because of its interest earning feature. So, play that faucet, and keep track of your interest payments, your faucet payments, and if applicable, your referral payments.

Why is it important to keep records of your crypto-transactions? There are several reasons, depending on the direction you take. If you get into trading, you will want a way to objectively analyze the profitability (or lack thereof) of your trades. If you buy and hold a particular coin, you will want to know the price you paid for it in order to determine a good time to sell it. A really important reason is that some of the transactions you make in the crypto-world are taxable events. In order to properly comply with the tax laws where you live, you will need to know what you did.

I am not in a position to give any kind of tax advice. However, I think it is safe to say that your tax reporting will be much easier if you go into it with thorough records, and there is no better time to begin keeping thorough records than right as you're just getting started.

Fortunately, it is not as difficult as you might think, and there are some great tools which have been developed with cryptocurrencies in mind. I know of two, which I will recommend you check out. Both have a free limited account option. Both have a price tag you will need to pay in order to fully utilize them.

Coin Tracking is a very comprehensive service that has been in business since 2013. You can easily import records from over twenty different trading platforms, you can import wallet transactions, and you can run APIs to automatically track future transactions. The tool is loaded with all kinds of analytics and will even generate completely filled in tax forms for a number of countries including Germany and the US. I played around with it some and contacted support with some questions pertaining to my own particular situation (which I'll admit is a bit off the beaten path, even for cryptos). I got a very detailed reply back within 24 hours telling me that yes, this tool could handle the particulars of my situation.

The tool is complicated and takes time to learn the ins and outs of. The free account allows tracking of up to 200 trades and manual wallet transaction entries. As you gain transactions in Bitcoin and other cryptocoins, you can enter those into Coin Tracking and use the information to figure out how it works. You will need to spend time learning how to do it, and the final results of analyses, tax forms, etc. will only be as good as the accuracy of your data. As I mentioned above, I would have loved to have known about this tool back when I had less than 200 trades to my name.

Bitcoin Tax is another tool that I am exploring. Its free version will allow up to 100 transactions, so again, great to work with in the very beginning at no cost. Once you exceed 100 transactions you have the option to buy a premium version for 2017 which will then allow you to input an unlimited number of transactions from 2017. If you have any transactions from 2016 or earlier years you will need to buy the premium version for those years. In that sense its fee structure is similar to the kind of tax reporting software you might purchase in the United States. You buy the software for the tax year you are filing for and then the following year you buy a new license.

Bitcoin tax in my opinion is simpler and more intuitive than Coin Tracking, and it's much less expensive. You will be spending more time working with your data, though. While Coin Tracking is programmed to accept whatever CSV format its numerous exchanges spit out, Bitcoin Tax really only accepts a particular format, which means that when you get the CSV exports from your exchanges (and they are all different) you will then need to import the data yourself into a program like Excel in order to put it into the right format for Bitcoin Tax, and then you can import it in. That is not an issue for me as I have those skills. There may be some other features that Coin Tracking has that Bitcoin Tax does not have. It also seems to be mainly geared with US tax filing in mind, so if you file taxes in a different country it may not be as helpful to you.

If you are at the point where all you have are a few wallet transactions, that is a great time to begin the discipline of record keeping. You can enter your transactions manually, and that's a good discipline at first as another way to work with your information and really get to know what you're doing. But most coin wallets do allow you to export data into an importable file format, and it's a matter of then working with that data to get it into whichever record keeping tool you're going to settle on. I would recommend trying out both tools and getting to know how they work, so that when you need it to give you some actual results, you don't feel like you're just running everything through a magic black box. Hopefully by the time you max out what you can do with a free account, you will be comfortable enough with one of the services to be willing to pay for it and consistently use it.

When entering records, keep in mind that it's not a transaction until funds hit your wallet. So, for example, if you are accumulating faucet earnings in Coinpot, you don't really need to track those until you get a payment from Coinpot to your own wallet. At that point it's a transaction you should record as some form of income. Since interest and faucet rolls are immediately credited to your Free Bitcoin account, and you have access to those funds, you can record those as they happen. At this point Free Bitcoin doesn't offer historical records (I have submitted a support requesting that for my own account), so the best thing is to record your interest and referral earnings at least once a week and your faucet claims as they occur. With that said, since you don't technically own the Free Bitcoin wallet, one could make the argument that you don't need to record anything until you make withdrawals, at which point you would consider any amount beyond what you have deposited to be income. This is the part where I'm supposed to say you need to consult with your own qualified tax advisor.

Bottom line: start keeping records of what you are doing with your cryptos.

[MR2O4]

This tip isn't as good as you other ones - you can't simply send your earnings over to Free Bitcoin and I'd can't find five faucets that link to CoinPot...

I did check, and Coinpot will send your earnings to the Moon Bitcoin registered address once 25,000 satoshi accumulate, so in that respect you don't have to do anything. But with the high Bitcoin price which corresponds to low faucet earnings, it's going to take a long time to reach that threshold on just one faucet.

Coinpot is one of several faucet aggregation services. I remember one called Faucetbox and another called Coinbox. Not sure if either of those are working now.

Honestly the reason I recommended Moon Bitcoin is because of its longevity. So many faucets come and go, but this one, along with Free Bitcoin, has stood the test of time. They recently contracted with Coinpot for distributions, but before that, their own internal threshold was 25,000 satoshis before they would pay you, so that part hasn't changed.

Edit: I tried to link a full blown Coinpot account to my Free Bitcoin deposit address and I will admit that is going to be at best an annoying process and at worst won't even work at all. What happened was I tried to register a Bitcoin Bonus faucet account, and it required me to register with an email account. Well, that registration automatically registered me with a full blown Coinpot account which wasn't the same account as the one connected to my Moon Bitcoin faucet address. So then I tried to link the two accounts and Coinpot wants me to either sign a message with the address or send a small deposit from it to prove that I own it. Well, since it's a Free Bitcoin address, I don't technically own it. I tried to send a small deposit, but it's probably not going to come from that particular address, which means I just blew many many claims worth of faucet earnings to try to prove ownership of an address I really don't own. I contacted their support to explain the situation but I'm not holding my breath for a reply. Personally I think demanding proof of ownership of addresses for faucet earnings is overkill.

So, what I would recommend you do once you register a Moon Bitcoin account (using your Free Bitcoin address) is to immediately then register the Coinpot account as a full blown account and hopefully the address will link that way with no fuss. Then when you register for other faucets using your email address, just use the same email address as you used to register your Coinpot account. But the important thing is to register your Coinpot account first, then register for the other Coinpot faucets. Someone who does this, please post here how it went.

I unfortunately did it in the wrong order, so for now I have one Coinpot account that is linked to my Moon Bitcoin faucet address (which is my Free Bitcoin address), and another Coinpot account with no addresses that will collect earnings from Bonus Bitcoin and Bit Fun. This simply means that I'll have to accumulate 25,000 satoshis in two accounts rather than just one, so not as efficient. And in order to send the earnings from the email-based Coinpot account I'll have to locate a Bitcoin address that I actually own, which may honestly not be worth it to me at this point. I'm hoping for a favorable response from my support request.

Moderator edit: Removed referral link

Moon Bitcoin wouldn't seem to let me register without the Coinpot account, so I think I lucked out there. Coinpot actually seems like quite a good service, now that I've taken some time to explore it. I have a few other faucets linked into it, both Bitcoin and some Moon alt coins. However, with Coinpot it is free to transfer the alt coins to Bitcoin and there isn't a minimum level - I tried it this morning. I'm actually building up my Coinpot balance quicker than Free bitcoins.

The tips on record keeping were something that I was meaning to start looking into too. I was only going to bother tracking transactions in my main wallets though, rather than anything from Faucets etc. Cointracking and Bitcoin tax are going to be good places to start my research though.

[jonaire99]

I've been involved in this industry for nearly five years and have been successful with it. In the interest of helping those new to the industry to also succeed I'm going to share a different "getting started" tip in this thread several times a week. I'll also update the top post as I add new tips.

Enjoy the steep learning curve. Do plenty of research and take responsibility to educate yourself, but be sure to also relax and have fun with it.

And now, the tips...

1. Get a good password manager.
2. Treat your BitcoinTalk ID as a valuable asset.
3. Register a Coinbase account.
4. Register a Free Bitcoin account.
5. Register a Moon Bitcoin account
6. Start keeping records.

Thanks for sharing these valuable tips/informations. Bieng a newbie in this forum, i need to learn more informations that me improve and succeed later.

[dxbcoin]

I have been not treating my BCT acct so well , but thanks for your vision. I would change it from today!

[She01]

Hi thank you for sharing relevant and helpful info here for those starting like me. I only got to know about bitcoin this year while surfing online. I tried freebitco and it's really good for newcomers and what I like about it is their lottery they have many prizes that's what I'm also looking forward to. For now I'm really interested on making it in this forum as I've read that many esp from my country are doing well and earning here. its not easy I know but I've been doing a lot of reading and back reading. i already know and understand how to rank up here. What Im interested to learn is about the bounty and airdrops as newbies can join esp on airdrops. Can you share your knowledge about these because even if im reading sometimes I dont understand it well. And what is ANN thread compared to Bounty thread? i hope you can answer in your future posts. Thank you in advance.

[wiser]

Hi there, thanks so much for stopping by.

Generally ANN threads start out as announcements about new coins and projects. For coins, these threads are often linked to directly from a coin's page on Coin MarketCap. For example, if you go to the DMD Diamond page on Coin Marketcap, you will see a series of links on the left hand side just below the coin name. The headings are "Website," "Announcement," "Explorer," etc. The link called "Announcement" will take you directly to DMD Diamond's Announcement thread right here on Bitcoin Talk. I like that they are posted on Coin Marketcap because there you can easily look up a coin you want to know more about, and from there easily get to the coin's website, the coin's announcement thread, the coin's block explorer, trading platforms that support the coin and more.

An airdrop is a way to distribute a new coin. There are various ways of distributing, including ICOs, mining, proof of stake minting and more. Airdrops involve the distribution of free tokens to people based on some parameter such as geography, citizenship, being a customer of a particular retail store, etc. In order to qualify for an airdrop, you would have to meet its requirements. I personally do not have a lot of experience with airdrops, but I did find this website which claims to monitor airdrops. Anyone who has used that site or who has others to recommend, I would love your feedback.

A bounty is a reward offered for work done in the development of a particular coin or project. For example, maybe a new coin's development team has a wallet for the coin for Windows and Linux, but none of their developers are familiar with Apple computers. If the team wants an Apple wallet developed, they could advertise a bounty offering to reward a programmer with a certain amount of coin once he has successfully created a wallet that people can run on their Mac computers. I am a writer, so I have earned a few bounties for various writing projects for different coins. In one case I earned a bounty for writing up an FAQ page for a website. The bounties I have earned I generally learned about in the course of my normal day to day interaction with a specific project's community (often the announcement thread for the project), but I believe people will also post threads announcing bounties as well. In order to be able to earn a bounty, you usually need some specific skills--programming, writing, etc.--that would help you to accomplish the particular project to be rewarded with a bounty.

Another way to earn money here that is fairly new to me is with signature campaigns. Each Bitcoin Talk user is allowed a signature which will show up at the bottom of each post. People have learned that signatures make great advertising, so the development teams of various projects have been willing to compensate people for placing an advertisement for that project in their signature. My signature at this time is an advertisement for DMD Diamond, and yes, I am participating in a paid DMD Diamond signature campaign.

Earning with your signature is an option that only gets better as you carefully cultivate your Bitcoin Talk reputation, as higher ranked members have better signature options. So please make sure that your posts are courteous, relevant, and either informative or asking good questions. It helps to also use correct grammar and spelling for the language you are writing in. And when you are participating in a signature campaign, be sure that your posts do not degenerate into spam. Do not post just to hawk the product you are advertising with your signature. You can bring it up if it's relevant to the discussion, but otherwise just post good quality posts in threads you are interested in and the people who read your material will also notice your signature.

Hi thank you for sharing relevant and helpful info here for those starting like me. I only got to know about bitcoin this year while surfing online. I tried freebitco and it's really good for newcomers and what I like about it is their lottery they have many prizes that's what I'm also looking forward to. For now I'm really interested on making it in this forum as I've read that many esp from my country are doing well and earning here. its not easy I know but I've been doing a lot of reading and back reading. i already know and understand how to rank up here. What Im interested to learn is about the bounty and airdrops as newbies can join esp on airdrops. Can you share your knowledge about these because even if im reading sometimes I dont understand it well. And what is ANN thread compared to Bounty thread? i hope you can answer in your future posts. Thank you in advance.

[She01]

You are most helpful thank you for taking the time to explain everything I understand it better now. ANN is short for announcement I didnt know that and its great you mentioned about Marketcap I know where to check now. You also explained what airdrop, bounty and signature campaign are. Thanks a lot!

[wiser]

Tip #7: Understand there's more besides Bitcoin

This forum got started back when Bitcoin was pretty much the only game in town when it came to cryptocurrencies. To this day its focus is on Bitcoin. However, we are now almost done with 2017, Bitcoin has been around for eight years, and it has inspired lots of new coins and other cryptocurrency related projects.

You may be feeling overwhelmed by all the information you are encountering about Bitcoin. I remember feeling that way too. I kept seeing these ads for writing to earn a different coin, also known as an altcoin, and I ignored them for several months because I thought I should just focus on Bitcoin until I'd mastered it.

If you ignore the other coins you are going to miss out on a good 99 percent of what the cryptocurrency world has to offer, including a lot of ways to earn.

There are currently over seven hundred actively traded coins, and several thousand more defunct coins. It is very important to understand that there are more dead altcoins than live ones.

So at this stage, I am only going to advise that you get to know about some of the other altcoins. I am going to show you how to most easily get the information and your "homework" will be to get to know two or three altcoins. Just get to know them, but don't buy any yet. I will provide future tips on what to look for in an altcoin, but today I'm going to focus on how you can find the information you'll need to make an informed judgment about an altcoin before you buy it.

Coin Market Cap will be your go to site to connect with all the active altcoins. You can also use it to look up inactive coins as long as you know the exact name or ticker symbol of the coin. Go ahead and bookmark coinmarketcap dot com.

The home page is a list of the top one hundred coins in terms of market cap. Market cap is the total value in Dollars represented by all the coins currently in circulation multiplied by the current market price of the coin. Right now, the price of one Bitcoin is $9607.11 and there are 16,705,012 BTC in circulation. So the market cap for Bitcoin is $9607.11 x 16,705,012 = $160,486,887,835. It's a very simple math problem and a good way to rank coins. It is an inflated number for a couple reasons. First, this amount would be realized only if every single Bitcoin were to be sold at its current market price all at once. However, if everyone who owned Bitcoins tried to sell them, the price would drop and drop until the last person to unload would get next to nothing. Second, it doesn't account for any coins that are lost. We know from various anecdotes that a few people who mined Bitcoin early on wiped their hard drives or in some other way lost access to those coins and so they are not actually in circulation.

The rank of coins has nothing to do with the coin's quality, only its market cap. You can have a coin that is high quality but still has a low market cap. Diamond, for example, has a current circulating supply of 2,531,992 and a price of $9.66, so its market cap is $24,447,193. Because the supply is so low compared to Bitcoin, even if Diamond were priced at $10,000 each, its total coin market cap would still be lower than Bitcoin's. As for the coin's actual value, well, you need to know right now that a lot of very poor quality coins go through periods of rapid price rise due to hype, pump and dump schemes or random weird market forces, so you can't just consider the price or the market cap in making your investment decisions.

If you click on the name of a coin from the Coin Market Cap home page, it will take you to a page that is just for that coin. For example, click on Ethereum to get to its page. You will see a repeat of the information for Ethereum that you saw on the home page. On the left hand side, under the name "Ethereum," you will see a short list of hyperlinked words like "Website," "Announcement," "Explorer," and more. The Website hyperlink takes you straight to Ethereum's website. The Announcement hyperlink takes you straight to Ethereum's announcement thread on this forum. the Explorer hyperlinks (in the case of Ethereum there are several) take you to block explorers for Ethereum. Other hyperlinks take to you other sources of information about Ethereum, such as Ethereum's own forum or message board, Ethereum's chat channel and even Ethereum's source code. If you were interested in investing in Ethereum, you would first want to spend time looking over those different sites.

We're still on Ethereum's page. Scroll down a bit to where the charts are. That shows a graph of the overall price (in BTC and USD) and market cap trends over time. You can click on Markets to learn where Ethereum is traded, Social to get updated feeds of various social media sites where Ethereum has a presence, and Historical Data to find out the daily high, low, open and close price for Ethereum as far back as you want to go (default is 30 days).

I used Ethereum as an example, but the pages are laid out the same for each coin. Some coins may have slightly less information than Ethereum, but it will all be there.

So, for your "homework," spend some time on Coin Market Cap. Get familiar with the home page and the pages of a few individual coins. When selecting coins to learn more about, don't limit yourself to the top 100 ranked coins. You can easily ask to see the next 100 to get lower ranked coins. Once you've picked a few, then start digging into the hyperlinked information found on each of their pages. Feel free to post any summary information of what you've learned here.

[kojoannan]

Yes I agree that Bitcointalk account is an asset.

[PensacolaPI]

@ Wiser a BIG thank you for your contribution. I've been reading as much as I can during the day on and off on this site. Doing research with Google based upon what I've read here. I'm an "OLD" new guy and if there's one thing I've learned in life is education pays huge dividends. I'll continue to follow this thread as you update it and continue to educate myself. I'm really not interested into getting into trading but I am looking to invest a small amount of say $2000 or $3000. After 10 plus days of research and reading I'm slowly narrowing down a list while I wait for my Ledger Nano S to arrive which should be by the weekend.

[moomooSHEEP]

@Wiser,

Really appreciate this post. I'm just getting started with Bitcoins/altcoins so this will help me out tremendously. Thanks. 

[lucky.mandy]

I've been involved in this industry for nearly five years and have been successful with it. In the interest of helping those new to the industry to also succeed I'm going to share a different "getting started" tip in this thread several times a week. I'll also update the top post as I add new tips.

Enjoy the steep learning curve. Do plenty of research and take responsibility to educate yourself, but be sure to also relax and have fun with it.

And now, the tips...

1. Get a good password manager.
2. Treat your BitcoinTalk ID as a valuable asset.
3. Register a Coinbase account.
4. Register a Free Bitcoin account.
5. Register a Moon Bitcoin account.
6. Start keeping records.
7. Understand there's more besides Bitcoin.

Wow. This is great. I'm new at cryptocurrency and Bitcoin so I will try this out. I'm outside US so coinbase might not be for me. Hope you can right more posts similar to this. Thanks.

[reme.auditor]

Thanks for this article. It is really helpful to me. Will try your step by step guide. Hope you can have more of these. Thanks again.

[thinkpad99]

Yes I agree that Bitcointalk account is an asset.

I recommend Waves because you do not have to spend huge sums of money like ETH or BTC. In addition, I prosper all the time and it seems to me that it will mean a lot in the future.

[wiser]

I'm taking a little break from sharing tips because I had some things come up in my life this past week that required more intense attention. However, I'm hoping to keep going with it by the middle of the week.

In the mean time, I came across this very well written nontechnical piece explaining what cryptocurrencies actually are, why they are valuable, and why they might not be valuable down the road. It's a very balanced, realistic view. I learned a lot from reading it, and I'm not exactly a newbie. It's a great article, one everyone involved in this industry should keep in their virtual library.

https://blog.chain.com/a-letter-to-jamie-dimon-de89d417cb80

[joshcmk88]

Does anyone know of a website that can help to start this whole bitcoin? From the setup and stuff?

[MR2O4]

Does anyone know of a website that can help to start this whole bitcoin? From the setup and stuff?

This is that website, especially this beginner section! With regards to set up, the wallet thread stacked at the top of this section is a good place to start!