I think what HCP said is good! Make sure you understand what crypto is about, don't just see it as some investment.
Crypto is the next big thing! First we had computers, then the internet, and then came crypto(decentralization, trustless, no single entity).
Investing time into learning and understanding it, will give you a head start for the future.
And finally, "Airdrop, ICO and Bounty" are the three least important things!
Airdrops are just a generally small amount of tokens tied to a newly started project, which means it's not worth much, might be in the future - however, an airdrop likely won't mean much anyway.
ICOs are like investing in a company startup, and in return, you get tokens. This is a gamble, because 90% of startups fail, and that surely applies in crypto aswell.
(get the odds on your side by doing your research)Bounties is the same idea as airdrops, but you have to do stuff to get the tokens. I hear people can earn a fair share of money on that.
ICOs also logically will take a good while to take off, since they're in their startup phase when you invest.
Either way, it's your research that matters - if you trust what a random person says about an ICO/coin/an investment in general, then you are
bound to lose sooner or later.
Research everything, the project, the team, is the team legit? is the project good? is there a reason for it to exist (as a coin/token)?
What's the coin economy like, how many coins are created, how many are held by the team, when are new coins put in circulation,
where does the value come from, etc etc - the more you research, the better you can trust your investment.
(this applies to all investments, not only ICOs)If you have a small amount of money to invest, ICO's could be a good way to go about it,
or find an already launched, but early stage project, and invest in it.
Whatever you do,
be certain you are 100% trusting your investment, otherwise you will likely end up panic selling or making a bad decision in general related to your investment.
If you are just holding, you need to be able to hold through the bad times.
You can try trading, but it's easy to lose.
If you have a good amount of money, you could put it in to one of the larger and more established crypto's, for a smaller risk.
Either way, there's literally
thousands of various coins/tokens/blockchain-related projects out there.
(a bit like the IT bubble), sooner or later, the large majority of those projects will be gone.
Who'll be the next (crypto equivalent of)
Google,
Microsoft,
Amazon, etc? do your research and you might find out!
Ultimately, it's up to you -
assume that when a stranger on the internet tells you about a project, he is in some way gaining from it, otherwise, why would he take his time/why would he want to give the knowledge away, instead of accumulating himself?
Referring to people saying buy this ICO, buy this superlow market cap coin, and such
Sure, people saying "buy btc" won't gain anything from a couple of hundred/thousand bucks going in, so those you could trust.
Still, make sure you know why you invest in bitcoin, don't just do it because someone told you it's cool and good.You are in charge of your crypto(if you hold it in a wallet), therefore, you are the only point of failure(99,9%).
No bank can help you if you lose your funds. It's up to you how much time you put into ensuring you understand what you're doing.
You are in charge of your investment, if you give away your money to a bad investment,
it's gone.
If you lose access to your crypto, send it to someone wrongly, give away your private key, get hacked etc -
it's gone.
(I have some tips for security in my link at the bottom)
That's the beauty of crypto in my opinion!and really, do look up crypto in general - don't just put some money in Coinbase and buy ETH and go afk -
read about it,
understand why it exists, what it enables - it's very fascinating.
I also made a guide explaining some wallet/safety stuff, but you probably don't understand much if you read it right now, you need to learn the basics (wallets, blockchains etc as HCP said)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3576100
