I think I bought a tiny amount of Bitcoin about 3 years ago. After fees, it was about $26 (bucks). Did a little testing to see how this all works and forgot about it. But not before I created a wallet on my computer (to see how that works). And then transferred some money to it. That all worked great.
Now zoom ahead. Of course I wrote my info down on a piece of paper but lost it.
So that tiny bit of money is gone, if I can't find the wallet. I can probably guess the password. But that's not why I came here.
I also had the original $26 in my original account (through a crypto currency exchange). That login info I still have. But I was surprised to see it was over 6 times what I had to start with. And it recently had a high of 7x the original amount. That got my interest.
NOW I have some questions that I should have asked before. Oh well, better late than never.
1) What are the typical (and lowest) fees to cash out, and have money transferred to bank account? I'm just going to leave the money in that account. And I might buy some more bitcoin (through the exchange I signed up with). But before I do, I need some answers. Fees are high for some transactions. I do NOT want to only use the option of leaving the money there forever, and just buy from that account. Mostly I will do that but there may/will come a day, when I want to cash out.
2) Is there ANY way of parking money, during a decline for instance, that just freezes the $ amount you have in an account? Like converting it to USD Cash, and just holding it so that a long decline doesn't wipe it out. Obviously it means taking out of whatever crypto currency it's in and putting it somewhere. But I don't see a "where" to do that. Obviously, one could begin the process of a transfer but that would cost heavy fees. And I guess one could just convert to another crypto currency that isn't falling.
But, in general, is there a way to just freeze the dollar amount you have in one of the exchanges?3) Addresses. I'm kind of confused about addresses and why they should only be used once. Easy enough to follow that good practice but I'd like to understand the "why". From what I have read, using an address more than once can lead to compromise of data, money, or something, because of the history factor of transactions it's used in.
Last night my daughter got me thinking about all of this. She has a bitcoin account and as a test, I wanted to see how sending worked, how much the fees were, and how long it took. So, she told me her bitcoin address, I used that to send her $10. It arrived in only a few minutes, and went through several stages of pending until it arrived. It took less than 30 minutes to become available. Fee was minimal. I think less than a buck. But if that address was to be used again, how could/would that compromise her account?
How does using an address, more than once, create a vulnerability? It's much easier to remember not to do something, if you know why it's a bad idea.
4) Related to #3: Also, everything I have read says to protect your address and not divulge it. However, if you need someone to send BTC to your account (as in paying you for something they bought), you have to tell at least them, don't you? If you send anyone your address, can that allow someone/anyone to take money out, instead of putting it in?
5) Partitioning money/Multiple accounts. What is the best way, or is there a way, to split up your money, into several accounts, such that a single address does not point back to ALL the money you have in BTC? I'm using CoinBase and I don't see a way to have multiple accounts, other than multiple crypto currencies. But that is counter productive, if you have a preferred crypto currency you want to use.
6) What if? Prices go up on BTC, when people are buying and go down, when people are selling. So I've read. I like to consider extreme cases. So, what happens if tomorrow, EVERYONE just stops using Bitcoin (hypothetically). Does bitcoin suddenly start a long decline? Is the price of BTC frozen and unchanging? What specifically happens, if everyone left there money in BTC, but just stopped buying or selling and there were no new buyers? What does the value of BTC do?
6) Login problems Kind of off-topic: I'm using coinbase. Every time I login, the website says the password is incorrect, and I have to go through the "Forgot Password" link to reset it. Even then, the next time I try to login, it says the password is wrong again. Why? and how do I fix it? This doesn't happen on my phone, only my desktop. I suspect it's a browser cache thing but not sure.