Thanks for the replies. I got more out of those than all of the website(s) I've been reading.
1) I thought I installed Electrum on my PC but I can't find the program after I close the Electrum interface. The only way I can figure to get to the 'interface' (wallet) is to re-run the setup.exe file. Is that the way it is supposed to work? I thought I was installing a program.
that sounds fishy. what OS are you running? where
exactly did you download "electrum" from, and did you verify the GPG signature? it's possible you downloaded malware.
2) If at this point, what I want to do with cryptocurrencies is to have a means to make payments but be able to move in and out of the cryptocurrency to protect against devaluation, what are the top things I need to do?
if you're just talking about accepting an occasional payment, you could just manually transfer coins to your exchange account (kraken, coinbase, etc) and sell them as the payments come in.
if you expect a high frequency of payments, you'll probably want something automated. you could pay a company like bitpay or coingate to invoice your customers and liquidate payments, for a fee. or if you're savvy enough, you could use a free open source payment processor like
BTCPay server and then use a script/API to send coins to your exchange account and liquidate them.
3) Also, is there a standard fee/commission for buying and selling crytocurrencies?
no, there is a huge range of fees across the whole market. it's highly dependent on region, and also on p2p vs ATM vs spot exchange. i've heard of effective ATM fees in the 30% range. big p2p traders often charge 5-10% premiums to smaller, more casual traders. but if you use a spot exchange like binance.us you'll pay 0.1%. on coinbase pro, you'll pay 0.5%.
